What is to be done is not obvious

I just finished reading an essay published in 2017 by a French journalist called Hervé Kempf, Tout est prêt pour que tout empire : 12 leçons pour éviter la catastrophe, which can be loosely translated as “Everything is in place so that everything will get worse : 12 ways of avoiding catastrophe”. It turns out that Kempf is quite a prolific author, who also edits an on-line daily bulletin (Reporterre) about environmental issues.

Kempf’s basic message in that book was that all three of what he considers to be the most important ongoing sources of major strain in today’s world, the ecology crisis, terrorism and the domination of neoliberal capitalism, are not at all separate issues but are instead interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Which is precisely the kind of message I have been trying to relay myself in most of my recent blogposts, although I see terrorism (and state terrorism) as being part and parcel of the rise of neofascism, not just in the Muslim world but in many other places as well.

I only found out about Kempf’s contributions a couple of weeks ago, after having read an article by Jacques B. Gélinas in the most recent issue (March 2018) of the left-wing Québec periodical, L’autre journal. The article was entitled “La vraie nature du néo-libre-échange d’aujourd’hui” (“The true nature of neo-free-trade today”), “neo-free-trade” being Gélinas’s synonym for neoliberalism, in which the tariff-reducing free trade of days gone by has been replaced by “governance”, the laissez-faire idea according to which government only exists nowadays to help business and nobody else.

Kempf began his demonstration by going back to the 1980s, with the decline and fall of the USSR and the large bloc of other communist countries, supported by influential communist parties in dozens of other places. A huge event that completely changed the ideological structure of the world, in spite of the fact that those countries and parties never really represented what they were supposed to have represented. They nevertheless forced the governments of the private capitalist countries to make concessions toward their own less fortunate citizens to prevent them from being attracted to Marxism.

The fall of communism also left an enormous ideological void in the world, that contributed greatly to the rise of neoliberalism and hyper-individualism. Not to mention the tremendous boost it gave to the rise of religious fundamentalism, particularly Islamic salafism, and all the terrorist movements associated with that ideology. Particularly after the Western empires, especially the American empire, constantly promoted such Islamic terrorist groups as military allies in their fight against the declining Soviet empire, in such places as Afghanistan.

Kempf also describes the large-scale dismantling of government intervention into the economy, in most of the countries belonging to the Western world as well as in many other non-Western countries suffering from neocolonialism, and how that process was bolstered to a very important extent by the entry of the formerly communist China into the world economy. By providing the rest of the world with huge quantities of cheap manufactured goods, low-wage China made it possible to lower the prices of consumer products in many different countries, and to break trade-union resistance to stagnant wages wherever it was necessary. (Quite an interesting role for a place still called the “People’s Republic”, ruled by a party still officially “communist”, at least in name.) Kempf also went on to show how the combination of all those converging events eventually resulted in an ever-increasing gap between a very small number of ultra-rich people and the vast majority of much poorer people, all over the world.

Kempf further outlines how many different social-democratic policies (“the welfare state”) were abandoned in country after country, as well as how political democracy itself was undermined in the USA, particularly during the Bush-Cheney period (2001-2009). As well as in the European Union, that met every challenge against its neoliberal rule by simply ignoring popular protests and democratic referendums all over the continent (as in France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Greece). Instead, the neoliberal rulers managed to concentrate all available government resources on treating the self-inflicted wounds of the world’s most important private capitalist investors, spending trillions of dollars in public funds on bailing out dozens of private banks and other private financial institutions, not only immediately after the 2008 “subprime” crisis broke out, but also (through “quantitative easing”) right up to the present day.

Kempf is also quite good at showing how the political and economic rulers of the world pretended to listen to the growing ecology movement, while simultaneously refusing to do anything serious about the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels all over the world. He devotes several pages to describing many other aspects of the ecology crisis, such as the poisoning of the Earth’s atmosphere, the cutting down of major forests in many different countries, the completely unregulated dumping of garbage into the world’s oceans, the onset of climate change and the proliferation of such “localized” environmental disasters as the explosion of a huge British Petroleum platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the horrendous nuclear accident at the Tepco company reactor in Fukushima, Japan.

Kempf’s analysis is also quite good on the rise of Islamic terrorism, that he traces back to events like the 1979 takeover of Iran by Shiite clerics, as well as the subsequent radicalization of Saudi Arabia itself. In 1980, a brief military occupation of the Muslim world’s main mosque in Mecca by a group of Islamic fundamentalists led to a full-scale revival of ultra-conservative Wahhabism throughout Saudi Arabia. That absolute monarchy then used its new-found wealth stemming from the tremendous increases in petroleum prices during the 1970s to send Islamic “missionaries” all over the Sunni-majority part of the Muslim world, to help convert millions of moderate believers into religious fanatics. Iran, of course, served a similar role in radicalizing several other countries with a significant Shiite population, such as in Iraq following the completely ridiculous military invasion by the USA in 2003.

In his book, Kempf also shows how those earlier events in Iran and Saudi Arabia led to further Muslim radicalization during such more recent events as the civil war in Algeria during the 1990s and the failure of the 2011 “Arab spring” uprisings in several other countries. The outcome of which included military dictatorships preventing reactionary, but nevertheless elected, Islamic movements from holding power in Egypt as well as in Algeria. Not to mention the extremely violent, still ongoing civil war in Syria, involving military interventions from many different powers, including the Saudi-funded Islamic State movement. (Whose potential revival seems to be one of Turkey’s objectives in its current invasion of Syria.)

But Kempf’s book does not refer to any other kind of religious radicalization and its terrorist offshoots than the Muslim kind, although he does refer in several places to the rise of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant nationalism in the USA and Europe. Personally, I think it is impossible to understand the ultra-right-wing populist movements in those countries, as well as in dozens of other places, without also investigating their own religious origins. In my view, both North American and European ultra-right-wing populism are constantly being bolstered by  fundamentalist “revivals” within Christianity, whether it be in countries with Catholic majorities (Poland, Hungary, etc.), Orthodox majorities (Russia, Serbia, etc.), or Protestant majorities (Britain, Germany).

Not to mention the much greater popularity recently gained by the evangelical churches, particularly the pentecostal movement, further radicalizing Christianity by converting “moderate” believers from all the other branches of that religion into “true believers”. In the USA, for example, the disastrous Trump movement has relied from the beginning on various different strains of Christian fundamentalism, particularly active in the Southern states, contributing greatly to the rise of neofascism in that country.

The fundamentalist radicalization of Christianity also applies within even greater force in Latin America and the Christian regions inside Africa, once again within the Catholic Church as well as within the various evangelical churches, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists. Third-world Christian fundamentalism also profits from billions of dollars being spent on proselytism by evangelicals living mainly in the USA, a country that plays a similar role in Christian radicalization to the radicalization of Sunni and Shiite Islamists financed largely by Saudi Arabia and Iran.

As for terrorism, although there is no large, world-wide, terrorist movement spawned by Christianity these days, equivalent to the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State movements inside Islam, abortion clinics in various countries have suffered from sporadic Christian terrorism, while in many other countries like the Central African Republic, unofficial Christian armies have been fighting it out for power with corresponding Islamic organizations. In the USA, the vast majority of the very numerous, well-armed, neofascist, survivor organizations also have close ties to antediluvian forms of Christian fundamentalism.

Most of the terrorism within Christian parts of the world, however, is state terrorism, often used by ultra-right-wing governments in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe against their own populations. As well as also being used by the supposedly liberal Western empires, and the Russian Federation, either as counter-insurgency forces attempting to eliminate Islamic extremists, or in the military “pacification” of such simultaneously anti-Islamist but also anti-Western dictators as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya. Although Kempf did not use the expression “state terrorism” in his book, he did refer quite often to attempted Western “pacification” of many different Muslim countries.

I am convinced that we should be referring to all the fundamentalist Muslim and fundamentalist Christian movements in this world as forms of neofascism. Left-wing groups inside the Western world, who choose to see Islamism as somehow “anti-imperialist” because that reactionary ideology is theoretically opposed to Western imperialism, are missing the point. As the very name, “Islamic State” implies, those Muslim reactionaries are trying to revive the imperialist caliphates of the so-called “golden age” of Islam, from the same period referred to in the West as the “Middle Ages”. They are in fact just as imperialist as any other kind of imperialism. We should also be referring to Hindu nationalism in India as another form of neofascism, and to Buddhist nationalism in such places as Myanmar and Sri Lanka as still another kind of ultra-right-wing populism, aka neofascism. Not to forget the state terrorism, and the increasingly obvious neofascism, of the “democratic” Jewish state of Israel.

Another kind of religious terrorism is also active inside the Khalistan “separatist” movement in the Punjab section of India, militant Sikhs there having also recently used the terrorist weapon in their fight for Sikh independence from India. Personally, I have nothing against independence movements as such, in various parts of the world, following the principle of the right of all peoples to self-determination. Although I do not see religion as being the world’s best reason for attaining national independence, given the “racialization” of minority religions in places like Israel, Pakistan and Myanmar. Not to mention the long-standing religious division of several peoples sharing common ethnic and linguistic origins, such as the recently warring states of Serbia (Orthodox Christianity), Croatia (Catholicism) and Bosnia (Muslim majority).

Of course, much of the Sikh terrorism of the 1980s was directed against the even more violent  state terrorism of the Indian government, as both mutually reinforcing cause and effect, during the same period. Canada, however, also suffered from Sikh terrorism back then as well, notably in the 1985 killing of several hundred Canadian citizens on an Air India flight between Montreal and London (UK). Which helps to explain much of the recent controversy concerning prime minister Justin Trudeau’s unsuccessful trip to India. In my view, terrorism has never helped any of the world’s independence movements achieve their goals, whether or not that terrorism had a religious origin or a more political origin, as in Québec and Ireland.

My objection about using terrorism as a weapon also applies, albeit somewhat less directly, to some of the “popular uprisings” against neoliberalism that Kempf also talks about in his book. Such as the 2005 “suburban rebellion” in France, during which participants took to the streets to destroy things, including thousands of cars, without checking to see whether or not all, or even the majority, of the individuals whose cars were demolished truly belonged to the category of ultra-rich “enemies of the people”. Nothing is more unpopular among ordinary people than “popular movements” that target ordinary people like themselves.

In his book, Kempf also referred very briefly to Confucianism when commenting on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. It seems to me, however, that Confucianism has also been revived, quite openly, as a cultural weapon of “communist” Chinese imperialism in today’s world. There is also apparently an important Shintoist faction inside some of the leading political parties in Japan, as well as an equally reactionary Buddhist element. Both of those examples of religious nationalism can also be seen within the framework of a world-wide tendency toward neofascism, fundamentalist religions in every case providing much of the popular support for ultra-reactionary official policies all over the world. Apparently, there are even neofascist tendencies arising within many of the indigenous populations in this world, also linked to similar kinds of religious fundamentalism within several of the animist (shamanist, totemist) religions.

As a result, I also take issue with Kempf’s message in the final paragraphs of his book, when, following Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, he refers to an alleged “need” to replace the material hedonism of private accumulation with some sort of spiritual guidance. Of which the only example Kempf gave was to cite Pope Francis about following in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi’s call for some sort of voluntary austerity. The Catholic Church, however, has a long history of fake claims when it comes to expressing genuine sympathy for the downtrodden, as Francis himself proved once again with his refusal to sanction bishops who openly tolerate the sexual predations of wayward priests. Since the world’s oldest religious institution first introduced “pastoral celibacy” a thousand years ago, millions of pedophile rape victims, of both sexes, have suffered tremendously all over the world from those priests refusal to practise “sexual austerity”. An uninterrupted trend that shows no signs whatsoever of ever slowing down.

In my view, this kind of “transcending asceticism” is worse than useless since it deflects away from the real issue, which is how to set up a kind of environmentally sustainable, genuinely social-democratic world that consciously rejects all the different varieties of elitism, sexism and racism, all over the world. Each one of the 200 or so countries on this planet cannot be considered to be any kind of functioning democracy unless most of the important decisions made in that country are made in the interests of most of its people. In places like Canada and the USA, for example, where the vast majority of the population is made up of service workers, most of the decisions made in such countries would have to be taken in the interests of service workers, in order to justify official claims about being genuine democracies.

Which is, quite obviously, light-years away from the current situation, as Kempf himself points out. The domination of neoliberalism in places like Canada and the USA means that the combined efforts of all the multinational private corporations, as well as governments at all levels being run as if they were private companies imitating profit maximization, are focused on making sure that most of the newly-created wealth is channelled into making already rich people that much richer. Since the 1980s, everyone else in such countries has been either treading water or falling even further behind. A situation that has been made that much worse by the recent revelations concerning thought control being channelled through social media like Facebook.

Since Kempf’s book was published, the Trump regime in the USA has put on a big show of renewed patriotism, such as with the recent tariffs being placed on imported steel and aluminum, without fundamentally changing the neoliberal profile of that country at all. Cutting corporate taxes, and rich individuals taxes, way down to historically low levels guarantees that none of that fake patriotism can possibly benefit anyone who does not resemble Donald Trump himself, financially speaking. A worse champion of populist anti-establishmentarianism would be hard to find anywhere on this besotted planet.

Which brings my critique of Kempf’s approach to a couple of more general observations, focusing not so much on what he wrote as on what he chose not to write. The first one of these more general critiques has to do with Kempf’s attitude toward science. In his book, the only positive reference to science lies in the fact that the vast majority of the world’s environmental scientists, such as those in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree completely with Kempf that no kind of future human society is possible unless human beings as a species succeed in overcoming the ecological crisis by putting a stop to their endless, uncontrolled pollution of the natural environment in dozens of different ways.

Aside from that, however, Kempf seems to imply that science and technology cannot be relied upon to contribute in any other significant way to that process because all the non-environmental scientists in the world seem to be caught up in a materialist ideology of technocratic “solutions” to everything. He seems to believe that those scientific technocrats deliberately ignore every human being’s individual responsibility to solve the crisis by renouncing economic growth altogether, all over the world, in a local-community, utopian-socialist, spontaneous coming-together of each person’s individual decision to focus on voluntary austerity. Which seems to me to be even more pie-in-the-sky than any kind of technocratic fix.

Kempf does not even refer in his book to any of the numerous groups of scientists and engineers in various different countries currently trying to do basic research on finding hitherto undiscovered substitutes for fossil fuels, such as those attempting to peacefully control fusion power (potentially much less polluting than either nuclear fission or hydrocarbons). The only types of fuels that meet with his approval are wind and solar power which, in their current state of development, could never become a viable substitute for fossil fuels in a world of 7.5 billion people, and counting. Fusion power, however, if it is ever discovered, would presumably suffer from at least one of the disadvantages of another major source of energy, hydroelectricity, namely its reliance on enormous investments in infrastructure. But fusion power would also completely avoid hydro’s other major drawback, the limited world-wide proximity of power-generating natural sites. Fusion’s “natural resources” being readily available, but currently unexploited, deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen, found in water.

From the point of view of a utopian-socialist like Kempf, however, technocratic solutions like fusion power are automatically “persona non grata”, because the research establishments (and the eventual power plants that would have to be built all over the place) require the kinds of financial investment that are normally only available with huge quantities of public funds being spent by very well-established government bureaucracies. To be sure, the recent, neoliberal-induced, decline in the powers of the nation-state, in all the richest countries (including those of the European Union), is making it difficult for any of the currently existing research programs in fusion power to make any headway, given the fact that they are all chronically under-funded, at least in comparison to the task at hand. Even if one of those teams did happen to achieve some kind of significant breakthrough, in spite of everything, it is not at all certain that the kind of large-scale, international cooperation necessary to bring functioning power plants into existence, in anywhere near the numbers necessary to play a major role on the world scene, is still possible.

Which brings me to the other major drawback in Kempf’s way of looking at things, namely his attitude toward not just the nation-state as an institution, but also toward state capitalism (aka, economic nationalism). By coincidence, I also just finished reading a completely different kind of book, Joshua Kurlantzick’s State capitalism: How the return of statism is transforming the world (published in 2016). Kurlantzick, a scholar associated with the very upper-crust and well-funded Council on Foreign Relations in the USA, started off his book by reiterating the official neoliberal viewpoint according to which “the free market” of private capitalism is usually much more conducive to political democracy than is state “intervention” into the economy.

He quickly points out, however, that state capitalism has existed at least as long as private capitalism and has sometimes coincided with democracy, even during the “thirty glorious years” of 1945-1975, at the height of the Cold War, in such non-communist countries as France, Japan and India. And he adds that the Western democracies in particular “oversold” the link between democracy and private capitalism in the Third World, leading many poorer countries to prefer authoritarianism after several decades of “democratic economic development” (largely based on neocolonial investment) that did not result in any significant increase in overall national wealth.

Kurlantzick’s main point is that most scholars, as well as many other observers (now including Hervé Kempf), have not even noticed the recent trend, since the 1990s, toward the return of state capitalism in dozens of different countries, most of which pursue authoritarian policies (China, Russia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Venezuela, Argentina, etc.), but some of which he characterizes as democratic (Brazil, Indonesia, Norway and Singapore). He also describes many of those state capitalist countries, whether authoritarian or democratic, as being often economically efficient, much more sophisticated than the state capitalists in dozens of other countries that did not succeed nearly so well (according to him) in earlier times (before 1945). Kurlantzick also refers to the existence of many lesser forms of state capitalism even in countries currently under the almost hegemonic control of neoliberalism, such as Canada, that includes within its borders such state-controlled companies as Hydro-Québec.

Although I do not agree at all with Kurlantzick’s often-reiterated prejudice in favour of private capitalism, I must admit that I was quite impressed with his capacity to realize that state capitalism does not necessarily have to be anti-democratic or inefficient. When I was doing research myself during the 1980s for both my master’s thesis (1984) and my doctoral thesis (1991), at the Université du Québec à Montréal, on the influence of economic nationalism in central Canada (Ontario and Québec) during the nineteenth century (1846-1885), very few of the secondary sources that I read back then had anything positive to say about my subject. Practically every history book and economic treatise published in the Western world during the Cold War was very heavily prejudiced against state capitalism, for ideological reasons, even in France during the Gaullist period (1958-1969). A prejudice that has finally come to be challenged in more recent historical work, such as William Ashworth’s 2017 book on the industrial revolution in Great Britain, that focuses (according to a review written by Pat Hudson in the January 2018 edition of History Today), on the crucial role that the British government played in fostering that all-important economic upheaval.

The final chapters in Kurlantzick’s book focus on some of the reasons why he perceives state capitalism as being a threat to the future of political democracy in many different Third World countries, as well as a threat to the future economic development of state capitalist countries as such, the future of state capitalism as a model, and even the future of the world economy itself. So far as he is concerned, however, the most important threat of all to be dealt with is the threat to democracy in general, all over the world, from the use of state firms as weapons against private capital in the two most important authoritarian countries, China and Russia.

What Kurlantzick obviously did not anticipate, when he wrote his book, was the election of a president of the USA who sometimes has positive things to say about government “intervention” into the economy, as well as about authoritarianism in Russia. Although as I pointed out earlier in this article, Donald Trump has not really abandoned neoliberalism at all, Kurlantzick himself must be having second thoughts these days on the positive relationship he seems to cherish between private capitalism and political democracy.

Personally, I do not think that the future of humanity is any better served by the domination of private, neoliberal capitalism than it is by the domination of state capitalism. In today’s world, all the countries practising neoliberalism since the 1980s have been going all-out so as to increase, as much as possible and as fast as possible, the already gigantic income gap between ultra-rich private investors and everyone else on this increasingly unstable planet. Their governments have been competing among themselves to offer generous tax breaks to extremely well-off individuals and their multinational corporations, who are also using every possible kind of legal and illegal tax evasion to even further concentrate capital accumulation into the smallest number of pudgy little hands possible.

Thereby forcing governments to impose increasingly stringent austerity programs on the rest of the population, making it impossible to provide any of the health, education and popular welfare services without which no societies can survive. Not to mention grossly underfunding the fight against pollution, the fight against gargantuan (advertising-induced) waste of raw materials, basic scientific research, and the environmentally friendly economic and social development of urban slums, as well as all the other neglected regions left behind in every possible country.

It is hard to see how any intelligent person could possibly describe upper-class and over-class dominated countries as somehow being democratic. Which does not mean, however, that most of the state capitalist countries are doing an any better job at being democratic themselves. China, easily the world’s most successful and arguably the world’s most authoritarian state capitalist country, having just recently given its leader the title of “emperor for life”, is obviously not at all interested in political democracy, nor in any kind of social democracy.

It is also not entirely state capitalist either, having adopted many of the different trappings of neoliberalism as well, such as becoming the new champion of “neo-free-trade”. Thereby imitating Great Britain’s nineteenth-century feat of proclaiming itself the anti-protectionist “workshop of the world” only after having gotten rich on government “intervention” in prior decades. Most of the other state capitalist countries mentioned in Kurlantzick’s book, such as India, also firmly support neoliberalism whenever it suits them. From the point of view of an outsider looking in, it all looks like some king of gargantuan conspiracy between Big Government and Big Capital, united against everything, and everyone, not big enough to count for much.

Getting back to my critique of Hervé Kempf’s book as such, aside from the fact that he did not seem to notice the recent revival of state capitalism, Kempf also had nothing to say about the threat of nuclear war, which ought to be seen as another major source of hypertension in this world. The number one source in fact, which, if ignored, could not just rid the Earth of all the people on it, but also of all the other multicellular creatures as well. With every one of the world’s nuclear powers rattling their sabres these days about ever-increasing “defence” spending, new radar-piercing missiles, “tactical” nuclear weapons and the need for everyone to listen to each leader’s strident rhetoric more than to any other leader’s strident rhetoric, I do not see how we can keep nuclear confrontation out of the list of the world’s most urgent, potential catastrophes.

So, what is to be done about all of these life-threatening sources of tension? We need to save the world, quickly and simultaneously, from nuclear annihilation, catastrophic climate change, economic collapse, neoliberalism, neofascism, religious terrorism and state terrorism. All of those things to be done are obvious. What is not so obvious is who are “we”? Who are the people with the power and the will to solve all of those Earth-shaking problems right now? Let’s be honest about this: the answer to that question does not seem the least bit obvious.