Totalitarian capitalism
During the Cold War (1945-1991), the world was officially divided between two competing ideologies, the first of which some comic geniuses in the dominant “Western” bloc decided to call “free enterprise”, while also deciding to identify the rival ideology by the much more prosaic and demeaning vocable of “totalitarian communism”. In fact, the bloc of countries professing to support “free enterprise” included quite a few more dictatorships than it did states pretending to be governed by thoroughly supine political parties engaging in periodic election campaigns. Not to mention the fact that most of the major corporations controlling the economies of those same countries were seldom very enterprising, and indeed distinctly more inclined to oligopoly than to anything like a genuinely “free market”. Which according to the dictionary is supposed to be as open to small investors, even micro-credit investors, as it is to much bigger ones.
As for the bloc of countries associated with “totalitarian communism”, many of them were certainly totalitarian, but not any more fundamentally socialist or communist than several of the countries belonging to the so-called “free world”. A small number of those not-very-free-world countries had developed social programs that were certainly never socialist or communist as such, but were designed instead to placate parts of their populations that seemed to be attracted to the merely rhetorical promises of the opposing ideological bloc. It turns out, however, that those programs were often more generous than most of the ones being adopted for real inside the only theoretically “communist” bloc.
From a more realistic point of view, the ideological slogans being put forward by both sides were just book covers poorly hiding a multifaceted fight between two conflicting forms of imperialism, one of them centred around the USA’s “American” empire and the other centred around the “Soviet” (Russian) empire. Both of which were much stronger back then than either of those two entities have become nowadays. Starting in 1979, the same comic geniuses who had originally invented the deliberately false name of “free enterprise”, decided instead to adopt the only slightly more neutral term of “neoliberalism” to describe their system. Which in spite of the name change is and always has been based on the straightforward maximization of private-corporate profit, whatever the consequences for everyone else. Following the collapse of the “Eastern” bloc in 1989 and the subsequent demise of the USSR (1922-1991) itself, neoliberalism soon became the world’s most important political, economic and social ideology.
The Eastern bloc’s implosion came about largely because of the constantly increasing dichotomy between the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that most of those countries were supposed to be promoting and the dominant, “new-class” bureaucracy that they were really promoting instead. But in a more geopolitical sense, that implosion would never have been so devastating but for the betrayal of the Soviet empire by the so-called “People’s” Republic of China. Which was a regional empire all by itself, whose refusal to kowtow to Russian imperialism led directly to its subsequent alliance instead with its previous arch-enemy, the US empire. Following the enormous trauma caused by the simultaneous disappearance of the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation that was left over embarked on an orgy of alcoholic self-destruction during the 1990s, losing two-thirds of its industrial strength in the process.
Meanwhile, the USA and its allies triumphantly proclaimed their world-wide victory over “totalitarian communism” by welcoming the turncoat Chinese imperial nation into the “international community” (the World Trade Organization) dominated by the American empire. China, however, soon turned the tables on the USA and its private-capitalist allies in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, profiting from the excessive greed and extremely feeble patriotism of their “multinational” corporations, by turning itself into the newest “workshop of the world”. Although several other, formerly Third-World countries (such as India and Mexico) also participated in this process, it was mostly government-sponsored Chinese firms that drained millions of industrial jobs away from the previously “developed world”, severely undermining the industrial strength of several Western countries, especially the USA. Abandoning official communism completely in 1979 (the same year that neoliberalism officially began), China emerged several decades later having successfully “defeated” both the defunct USSR and the still-existing USA on the industrial front, becoming the world’s most dynamic industrial economy by far.
Under neoliberalism, private-capitalist countries and firms no longer have to pretend in the old paternalist fashion that they are providing jobs for workers and welfare for the destitute (through ordinary taxation), while simultaneously trying to take even more profit out of the economic system than their predecessors ever managed to do. As depicted even in popular film comedies like “Pretty Woman”, corporate raiders armed with “lean” slogans like “shareholder rights” have turned profit maximization into a much more direct, much more efficient process. Namely by treating the entire, globalized world economy in the same way that multinational corporations have always extracted natural resources from the environment, by leaving nothing but dirt and destruction in their wake.
Which means that we have now entered into the era of totalitarian capitalism, in which mostly private-capitalist countries (“market economies”) like the USA, and mostly state-capitalist countries (“non-market economies”) like China, dominate the world together. The latter group includes not only a few previously-communist countries like China and Vietnam, but also quite a few more orthodox right-wing governments, such as military dictatorships (Egypt) and religious autocracies (Iran, Saudi Arabia). According to Joshua Kurlantzick, author of State Capitalism: How the Return of Statism is Transforming the World (2016), only one (Norway) of those very numerous state-capitalist (non-market) economies has adopted electoral democracy as a political system. Donald Trump’s USA, currently involved in a trade war with “non-market” China, keeps trying to ignore the fact that several of its closest allies, such as Saudi Arabia, are “non-market economies” also.
In the real world, however, both of those two competing “kinds” of countries, market and non-market, are merely situated more or less at different ends of the same private-public spectrum, with those countries favouring private investment more than public investment on one end, and those doing just the opposite on the other end. Since capitalism began at the close of the European “Middle Ages”, none of the world’s capitalist countries have ever relied solely on private investment, nor entirely on public investment (also known as government “intervention” into the economy), but have always combined private “enterprise” with state “enterprise” in various differing degrees. Canada for example, which is normally classified among the market economies, nevertheless contains within its official borders a large number of government-owned enterprises (such as Hydro-Québec), some of which are quite important in that nation’s economy. In spite of those realities, in today’s world neoliberalism has still become the official title of the ideology associated with those countries favouring private investment over public investment.
The ideology associated with countries favouring public investment instead, or highly-government-controlled private investment (as in China), is usually called economic nationalism. Some ultra-right-wing politicians, even in such otherwise neoliberal countries as Donald Trump’s USA, also use small dollops of economic nationalism from time to time, in an attempt to appear more patriotic than their “internationalist” adversaries (those still favouring multilateral economic treaties). In spite of the fact that many of those same ultra-right-wing politicians also continue to lean much more heavily toward neoliberalism in most of their policy statements. Even theoretically “non-market” countries like China also use neoliberalism extensively in their own policies, in spite of their tendency to favour government control instead. With the result that most of the world’s state-sponsored corporations have aligned most of their investment on copying the private-capitalist model, single-mindedly pursuing the maximization of quarterly profit just like the folks from the “opposing” model.
What both ends of the spectrum have in common is their shared desire to ignore the needs of the common people in every country as much as possible, so that they can concentrate all their available resources on fighting a turf war with rival countries, each joint private/public concentration of political and economic power in the world trying to dominate the planet at the expense of all the others, allies and enemies alike. In other words, “make America (or China, or any other rival empire) great again”, which also translates into ”the war of each against all”, as Thomas Hobbes might have put it. Whenever any of those rival administrations, the ones using more economic liberalism than economic nationalism, as well as the ones using more economic nationalism than economic liberalism, support ultra-right-wing populist policies in the pursuit of their goals, they can also quite rightly be accused of promoting neofascism as well, at the same time.
As a result, openly racist, sexist and ultra-elitist forms of neofascism now exist in every part of the world, dovetailing quite nicely with ultra-individualist neoliberalism by stripping away the paper-thin, “human rights” veneer of professional politicians like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau. Only to replace that veneer with something even worse, namely the enthusiastically reactionary, more ape-like behaviour of populist politicians like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro and a host of other “anti-democratic (neofascist) revolutionaries”. (Homo sapiens being after all, as someone once pointed out, “the greatest of the great apes”.)
All over the world, the rich and the powerful people composing each country’s national-imperial, private/public oligarchy have succeeded in forcing their poorer and less powerful citizens into paying for every one of their stupid decisions, such as refusing to do anything real about the enormously deleterious effects of all the different kinds of industrial pollution. Or by deliberately impoverishing certain selected regions of the world (central America, southeastern Europe, northern Africa, western Asia, etc.), more than most of the other regions in the world, to the extent that a large percentage of the people in those particular places are forced into attempting mass migration out of those exceptionally blighted areas. Or by conspiring in a thousand different ways to enormously enlarge the already huge income gap between all the world’s richest people, on the one hand, and all the world’s poorest people, on the other extreme.
At the same time, the world’s most important private enterprises, and public enterprises, also “cross the line” constantly from legal into illegal operations, conspiring with full-time organized crime on a grand scale in millions of diabolical schemes designed to increase the rate of profit even higher than those achievable under (partly) legal conditions. Governments, and state-sponsored corporations, become corrupt, and therefore “inefficient” at running modern economies properly, whenever they help huge private corporations take part of their ill-gotten wealth from ordinary taxpayers, rather than trying to regulate the peculiar financial activities of the world’s richest investors.
Joint private/public corruption ends up creating thousands of enormous illegal zones inside dozens of different countries, that are “off-limits” to all those police forces and regular armies that have not yet transformed all their own operations into totally criminal activities. Particularly inside the world’s increasingly numerous “failed states”, completely divided up between rival warlords running their own private armies. Many of the organized-crime warlords all over the world run their operations strictly for profit, while many others also promote some kind of political ideology as well, often acting “on behalf” of some particular religious denomination, or some particular ethnic group, sometimes using “indigenous autonomy” as a cover for trafficking in illegal drugs, weapons, precious metals and/or immigrant slaves.
Over the past few years, also in dozens of different countries, such as the USA, Italy, Brazil, Nigeria and Pakistan, ultra-right-wing expressions like “drain the swamp” have been invented, which in most cases means ridding each country of all those officially considered to be “sinners”, like people on welfare, female adulterers, village “witches”, homosexuals and drug addicts, the same kind of “useless eaters” that were severely punished for their “sins” during the Nazi period in Germany. The general idea being to eventually kill off everyone in the world who is not doing whatever the particular ultra-right-wing movement in each case wants them to do, either because they are not acting like “good Christians”, or “good Muslims”, or because they are acting in some “un-American”, or “un-European, “un-Russian” or “un-Chinese” way, like the communists and their fellow travellers in the USA were accused of doing during the Cold War. In today’s USA, however, it would be much more appropriate to accuse most of the billionaire executives of that country’s major manufacturing industries with such diabolical “un-American” behaviour.
Be that as it may, in each one of the above cases, the ultra-right-wing populists threatening to drain their respective swamps are seeking what they consider to be “perfection” in a world inhabited by mostly imperfect people. They all want to rid their countries of the “enemies of the people”, like those in the anti-establishment wing of the Democratic Party in the USA, welfare recipients all over the world (particularly if they do not have the right skin colour), all those who do not seem to be able to “fend for themselves”, as well as all the unbelievers, those who are not good, evangelical Christians, or ultra-Islamist Muslims, or any other kind of religious fanatics. Or even those people who do not go far enough in the pursuit of the extremist cause (like liberal Republicans in the USA).
In situations such as these, in every different region and culture, once things get really out of hand, the whole situation can degenerate into civil war, with people as crazy as those supporting the Islamic State in different parts of Asia and Africa even killing off members in good standing of Al Qaeda for being “imperfectly radicalized”. In other words, kill everybody who is not perfect and since nobody is perfect, that means everybody. More or less in the same way that the “deviants” in Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, were also killed way back when, in search of what was supposed to have been a radically different kind of “perfection”.
One of the best books that I have consulted recently, to further develop my own interpretation of such things, was Alain Deneault’s contribution, Faire l’économie de la haine: Essais sur la censure, published in Quebec in 2018. Deneault is a prolific writer on contemporary capitalism, who has become the program director of the International College of Philosophy, in Paris (France). He became quite well-known following the publication of a previous book (2008) that he wrote, along with Delphine Abadie and William Sacher, called Noir Canada, about the horrible depredations caused by Canadian mining companies in Africa, particularly Barrick Gold in Tanzania. That multinational corporation took him to court for libel and defamation, succeeding in getting his book totally censored and removed from circulation, an enormously costly process for Deneault, the two other authors and their editor. So much for freedom of expression, “even” in Canada, which seems to enjoy a largely undeserved reputation for being relatively open to criticism of predatory capitalism.
Deneault’s 2018 book is in fact a re-editing of several of his previously published articles over the past several years, denouncing not only the various ways in which multinational corporations and tax-evading investors control large sections of the world economy and most of the world’s governments. But also analyzing just how thoroughly the so-called “justice” system, the highly elitist academic establishment and even the dangerous world of professional sport (including the falsely-amateur Olympic Games), have all intimately incorporated private-capitalist exploitation, performance-based physical deprivation and much-intensified forms of censorship into their own collaborating systems of all-inclusive social control.
The ultimate goal of which has been to put into place a comprehensive ideological environment covering all aspects of human society by which the very numerous victims of private (or public) capitalist exploitation, all over the world, have been rendered so completely alienated from reality by official obfuscation that they can no longer identify, let alone consciously blame, the real perpetrators for their crimes. All of which helps a great deal to explain the rise of the world-wide, ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) movements that I identified in the preceding paragraphs, run by a gang of demagogic dictators (or would-be dictators) who belong to the self-same “liberal swamp” (in fact, the neoliberal swamp) that they are constantly attacking in their extremely misleading propaganda.
I agree completely with Deneault that censorship of inhuman industrial exploitation is certainly one of the main goals for setting up that all-encompassing, world-wide, environment of deliberate ignorance. Unfortunately, the same kind of totally unjustified censorship also shows up in extremely well-known cases as well, in which the censorship involved is often “hidden in plain sight” (as in the Edgar Allan Poe story, “The Purloined Letter”), rather than buried under a ton of legal machinations. One outstanding recent case being the Islamic-terrorist movement’s murderous campaign to silence all those involved in “blaspheming” the prophet Mohamed, like the Christian woman in Pakistan condemned to death (at one point) for blasphemy, who was in fact set up by her neighbours in a personal dispute that had nothing to do with the “crime” for which she was charged.
Or the equally well-known example of the by-no-means-hidden censorship involved in the very recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights to condemn another woman in Austria for the fake crime of “inciting hatred and violence” against the Muslim religion by implying that the prophet Mohamed must have been a pedophile because of his marriage with his wife, Aïcha, when she was only six years old, a marriage that was then consummated when she was only nine. As pointed out by journalist Pierre Trudel in an editorial (“L’Europe n’est plus Charlie”) published in Le Devoir (October 30, 2018), that legal decision effectively put an end to any official European attempts to uphold freedom of speech against the Islamic terrorists who murdered the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris back in 2015.
Does that also mean that, in Europe and anywhere else, anyone who condemns the hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests who raped millions of innocent boys and girls, all over the world, since they were denied the right to marry during the Middle Ages, will also be condemned for blasphemy? Or are we supposed to understand instead that it is only religious fanatics who threaten to riot over such things that can convince a court to condemn someone who criticizes their religion in public? At least in Europe, it seems that today’s Christian extremists are not as eager to riot against “blasphemous”, but nevertheless well-founded, criticism of their religion, at least not as often these days, as do the Islamist ones living in that same continent.
All of which has also been accompanied by yet another kind of hypocritical, open censorship, that of professional do-gooders in the West, those of Christian as well as those of Muslim origin, inveigling against Islamophobia all the time, while deliberately ignoring the fact that the percentage of Muslims hating all Christians and Jews is as great as the percentage of Christians and Jews hating all Muslims. Not only in Muslim-majority countries but also in places where Muslims are only a small minority of the total population. Which, once again, also applies to all the similar campaigns of open censorship and hatred, in every possible direction, involving extremists belonging to all the other religions on this planet, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, shamanism and so on. All the religious fanatics in the world seem to want to get in on this particular act.
Open censorship is also becoming much more frequent these days even in cases having nothing to do with extractive industries or with religions, because of the rulers of so many different countries excessive reliance on political correctness. In Québec, for example, the electoral commission recently condemned a trade union for publishing a table comparing the platforms of various different political parties on environmental questions, prior to an election campaign. The fact that all the information published was taken from each party’s official platform, and did not involve any editorial extrapolation whatsoever, had no impact on the commissioners’ love affair with censorship, in this case apparently for its own sake.
Censorship of history is also one of the world’s favourite pastimes these days. The ultra-right-wing government in Poland has become well-known recently for attempting to stifle any professional historians suggestion, according to which a majority, rather than a small minority, of Catholic Poles collaborated with the Nazis, against the Jews, during the Second World War. French president Emmanuel Macron also tried to turn history on its head (once again) during the centennial ceremonies relating to the First World War by claiming that general Philippe Pétain was a good patriotic soldier during that conflict, even if he also became an official Nazi collaborator later on, during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, in Québec, people close to the centres of power are even suggesting that the sections of the high school course on Quebec history, pertaining to different “cultural communities”, should be written by militant representatives of those groups themselves, rather than by professional historians. Private enterprise has also contributed in its own populist fashion to historical obfuscation, as in the case of the popular US television program on the “Historia” network, claiming in a strangely backward-racist way that all the great ancient civilizations must have been founded by extra-terrestrial aliens, since none of them could have ever have built such amazing buildings as the Egyptian pyramids without outside help.
One of Denault’s best chapters was about how the world of economic statistics has also been completely reorganized so as to provide extensively manipulated, quantitative “proof” (back-stopping) for the recent benchmarking trends in corporate development. The idea behind benchmarking being for any particular corporate executive to troll through the investment practices of the “best” companies in whatever business for which that person happens to be working, in order to figure out how to plan for the future of said executive’s own company.
Based on the fact that benchmarking (a term borrowed from the gun industry) always defines the “best” practices as being those that are the most profitable to major investors, its real goal is to make sure that any successful company’s quarter-year rate of profit will always exceed its previously established rate of profit by a considerable margin. Otherwise, “the market” (i.e., the other major investors) will severely punish any large corporations whose results do not live up to its expectations, as has happened dozens of times recently even to extremely well-performing private corporations like Apple, and also even to extremely well-performing, entire countries like China.
It seems to me that the whole benchmarking process is exactly the kind of robotic monstrosity that I have been denouncing over the past several years, in other words a system in which the world’s most important private firms, and their state-capitalist imitators, go about their business without giving a damn about anyone, or anything, else. Not the millions of permanently laid-off workers, and their families, all over the world, nor the severely underpaid employees left behind to do all the work by themselves after restructuring has taken place, nor the abandoned suppliers or customers, nor the equally abandoned local governments and public or private infrastructure (schools, hospitals, restaurants, etc.) in all the affected communities. Nor the millions of people all over the world forced to work compulsory overtime and on unpaid internships. Nor the other millions of temporary, foreign workers treated like slaves in many of the richer countries, who are sent back to wherever they came from just as soon as they get upset about anything.
Nor the ever-increasing numbers of victims of on-the-job “accidents” and highly predictable crashes, derailments, explosions and other “incidents” breaking out all over the world, especially since neoliberalism was put into place. Including examples like the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India, back in 1984, or the Canadian Pacific/Irving Oil explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Québec, in 2013, along with several thousand other such examples along the way. Nor, least of all, completely ignoring the God-forsaken (from an ironic, pro-capitalist point of view) natural environment wherever it may raise its “ugly” (anti-capitalist) head.
Needless to say, none of all this programmed dystopia fazes in the least those professional prostitutes from the financial media, who are always droning on and on about how such anti-capitalist inventions as “corporate social responsibility” seem to be killing off such patriotic endeavours as the much-beleaguered tar sands in the Canadian province of Alberta. Thereby also reducing Canada’s (or any other country’s) competitiveness vis-à-vis any other private-capitalist jurisdictions all over the world, not to mention having to put up with so-called “government-related trade distortions” coming from state-capitalist countries.
After all, the economic sycophants add, every private firm only makes money by creating wealth (wealth being in their view a synonym for profit), meaning that any firm that loses money is also destroying wealth, and that therefore any government subsidy for such non-performing firms simply worsens the overall situation. Tie-ing themselves up in ideological knots as poorly constructed as these ones effectively prevents such deliberately myopic commentators from noticing just how much real wealth in fact is constantly being destroyed by financial investors whose only “benchmark” is the enormously bloated size of their own entirely speculative portfolios. None of the neoliberal bench-markers could give a fig about any “externalities”, such as the “socialized wealth” to be found in local community infrastructure, that does not immediately service the ravenous needs of their own companies’ short-term, quarterly reports. Not to mention the fact that all the government tax “incentives” designed to encourage investment in any particular region or industry, are simply added on the profit side to investors’ overall balance-sheets, without ever resulting in any increased investment on a world scale.
As time goes on, the entire system of profit accumulation is acting more and more like a machine, or a robot, in which opposition to the prevailing point of view becomes more and more difficult. The whole situation is starting to resemble a bad television drama in which the male hero realizes all of a sudden that he cannot just drive his car down a steep mountain slope in the middle of a rainstorm to recover some object that has fallen over the side of the cliff, and that he is going to have to get out of his car and climb down that dangerous, slippery slope on foot to recover whatever he wants. The common (“ordinary”) people in this world are like that driver, who have to do all the heavy lifting by themselves, all the time, because under the neoliberal system of austerity and limited government, or state-capitalist society imitating private enterprise, the entire system everywhere in the world is working for the exclusive benefit of a tiny minority of benchmark people at the very tip-top of the social pyramid (in the same position as the car in the above soap-opera drama), who have permanently lost all interest in any “social partners” except themselves.
Politicians making speeches all over the world, as well as ordinary scribblers writing columns in the media, or the authors of most letters to the editor, or of most social media pages, are constantly attacking each other back and forth, forgetting that their fake “democracy”, or their phoney “make-my-nation-great-again” project, all have to line up behind the lion’s share taken by the benchmark people, in order to search for any scraps that may have fallen off the leading investors’ table. Ordinary white men (“poor white trash”) supporting authoritarian “Big Daddies” like Trump and Putin, or ordinary supporters of similar dictatorships in any of the mostly non-white portions of the planet, have to realize that in order to “share the wealth” with the benchmark guys from the world’s “best” firms, they are going to have to help their own local Big Daddy take that wealth away from their very own "women-folk", or from the “inferior races” that surround them, or from the homeless “useless eaters”, or from anyone at all who is not already a billionaire tycoon.
In the current context, it does not seem any longer possible to hope that victims of both kinds of capitalism (public and private), such as the people in the working class, who have become much more numerous in today’s world than they ever were before, will suddenly wake up from their centuries-old slumber and adopt a genuinely pro-communist or a pro-socialist point of view. Although it might seem normal that people of humble origins would naturally gravitate toward such an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist attitude, it does not seem very realistic to think that such a thing could happen any more nowadays. The enormous barrage of neoliberal and neofascist propaganda over the past forty years, coupled with the abject failure of all the communist and democratic-socialist parties, certainly seem to have rendered that kind of solution to the world’s most important problems completely out of reach.
Government-sponsored corporations in dozens of different countries have even decided to take over the sale of often-harmful products of popular consumption, such as alcohol, gambling (lottery tickets), marijuana and similar “lower-class” vices, playing the same anti-social role that used to be played by organized crime. In order to stay “close to the people”, left-wing populist politicians like former British-Columbia premier Mike Harcourt have ended up becoming (“BC-bud”) marijuana executives after retiring from active politics. The same Mike Harcourt who once signed an official party document praising one of my closest relatives for his “50 years of service” to the cause of democratic socialism in that Canadian province. Left-wing populists all over the world are also capable of (quite correctly) denouncing Big Business for massive (legal and illegal) tax evasion, but still simultaneously supporting government tax breaks aimed at encouraging private investment (without much success) in various different industries.
In most parts of the world, the powers-that-be have generally succeeded over the past forty years in greatly diminishing any militant, anti-capitalist activities, resulting in an enormous decline in union membership, many fewer successful, large-scale, strike movements, and even a dearth of any widespread student agitation. When exceptional confrontations do break out, they are often like the current “yellow-vest” agitation in France, which is one of the best recent examples demonstrating just how dysfunctional human society has become these days.
Millions of ordinary French citizens outside the most important cities in that country have been forced in recent decades to rely almost exclusively on using their private cars to get around from place to place in order to do their individual, day-to-day sales or professional work (as in most parts of North America). Simply because their government has refused to maintain the once-extensive public rail system that used to exist all over the country, in order to focus on providing very expensive, high-speed rail for major cities only. Which means that when the ultra-elitist Macron government recently decided, ostensibly for ecological reasons, to significantly increase already high taxes on diesel fuel and gasoline (for cars), the people required by law to keep yellow vests inside their cars (in case of accidents) used those same vests as a symbol of what soon became a nation-wide protest against the new taxes, that have since been withdrawn.
As in many other such cases, the extreme violence often used during those protests may have sometimes been organized by security-force provocateurs, as well as quite often by some of the well-prepared protesters themselves. In any case, as I have been pointing out over and over again in my blogposts, elitist governments do not seem to have the faintest idea nowadays how to handle two major crises at the same time, such as the ecology crisis and increasingly extreme divisions between the social classes.
Governments all over the world seem to have given up altogether on reducing social inequality, in order to avoid rioting, as well as having given up completely on promoting peaceful coexistence, or international controls on the use of nuclear weapons, in order to avoid future wars, especially the much-projected, totally-annihilating “Third World War”. Most government programs to help the homeless have also been abandoned, in favour of a return to private charity, asking the public and small businesses to help them instead. As a result, ordinary people have taken to relying on help from the world’s largest foundations run by private philanthropists, completely forgetting that all those foundations also profit enormously from hiding their money in the world’s most popular tax havens.
Having given all their tax money away to the banks, the multinational corporations and the phoney “philanthropists”, governments no longer have the wherewithal to sustain ordinary public expenditure on such things as public transit, or environmental protection. In any case, as was pointed out recently by Pierre Cloutier de Repentigny, from the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, “the way laws are constructed around a market economy approach makes them fundamentally incompatible with environmental protection” (The Montreal Gazette, November 17, 2018).
My own personal “theory of everything human”, that I use to help explain these increasingly complex problems, is what I have been reluctantly forced to call “the gang-rape theory” of human relations. In other words, trying to analyze how human society works nowadays by comparing it metaphorically to the horrific situation that everyone has heard about, involving any particular gang of Catholic priests in any particular boarding school raping a group of boys as they have so often done, all over the world, in the past. Then taking those same boys to the confessional afterwards in order to get them to pray to God to spare them from being punished for their sins, the boys themselves getting blamed for the sins committed by the priests! In my theory, this falsely pious gang-rape can be compared to Deneault’s description of all the increasingly sophisticated, neoliberal ways by which most large private firms nowadays, in every field of investment, dissimulate their own increasingly inhuman social evils.
The victims, in this case everyone not belonging to the benchmark class, always have to submit to the equivalent of a “gang-rape”, in dozens of delightfully sophisticated ways, in order to preserve the system of domination set up all over the world by humanity’s alpha males. But they also have to be persuaded, before, during and after their ordeals, that the fact that they are being treated in all those painful, humiliating ways is in reality their own fault, because they had the temerity (hubris) to want the dominant males (as well as a few dominant females like Margaret Thatcher) to share the available wealth with them equitably, in the first place. Which is more or less the equivalent, I suppose, in Greek mythology, of what happened to the titan, Prometheus, after he stole fire from the supreme god, Zeus. Or, much more recently, what has happened to the Greek nation itself, over the past few years, as the price of its membership in the European Union.
In my opinion, the whole of human society nowadays also resembles the very familiar pattern of sexually mistreated girls (who in fact get victimized a lot more often than boys) getting blamed by the perpetrators, and by the perpetrators’ lawyers, for having “caused” the rapes they are suffering from by having dared to wear short skirts in public, or some other similar, invented excuse. In other words, whatever the metaphor being used, human society is always a system of multiple victimization, starting with the initial rape (or other similar crime) itself, which gets repeated first in the ultra-expensive courts of law, then in ultra-elitist academic discourse about the subject, as well as in the extremely horrific, social media. Leaving behind all the metaphors, wherever human beings gather and discuss, people designated as “inferiors” must always be assaulted by their social “superiors”, over and over again, in every possible way, forever and whenever, in order to preserve a “properly functioning society”, that in every case is always unfortunately based on some kind of sadomasochistic domination scenario.
As a general theory of everything human, the concept of sadomasochistic domination should be seen as a metaphor of human interaction that can be applied to any particular predicate of the same essential subject (social intercourse). There may be an infinite number of potential variations on this theme, as long as they are always about violence and aggression. Like the French word “viol”, meaning rape, which has the same root as the word “violence”, this particular word having the same meaning in both English and French.
This is in fact quite a “bipartisan” (or multi-partisan) sort of theory. It can be used in all sorts of different social situations and public debates, such as the current debate between neoliberalism and neofascism (ultra-right-wing populism) all over the world, in which various ruling elites succeed in disagreeing violently with each other over which is the best way of mistreating all the “inferior” people in the world nowadays. The tiny minority of people running liberal-democratic countries, for example, are not the least bit interested in doing away with the popular illusion, that millions of ordinary people apparently still possess in such countries, that they are in fact participating in the election of genuinely “democratic” governments.
In such countries, the rich and the powerful benchmark people who run them are convinced that such elections have served them well over the years by maintaining the illusion of “popular participation in power”. Much better than in military dictatorships (such as in Egypt) in which the people have to be ruled by military might, supplemented only with the fear of “terrorism”, such as that which ensued in that country immediately after the elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by the Sissi dictatorship. Electoral democracy is also preferable, at least to rulers of self-proclaimed “democracies”, because it turns out to be quite a bit more stable (or rather because it used to be more stable) than the even more violent dictatorship of terrorist groups like the Islamic State, that temporarily ruled much larger portions of Syria and Iraq than those ultra-reactionary people currently run. A self-defined “caliphate” that the same organization may soon be setting up in Afghanistan instead.
The across-the-board conclusion being that whether or not the people in power still support the democratic illusion, or opt instead for some more neofascist method of government, does not change the underlying reality. All the common people in every place, whether that place is falsely democratic or violently anti-undemocratic, are still victims of those in power, although not always to the same extent. Whether they realize it or not.
Whatever method of “governance” is currently being chosen by dominant people all over the world, in order to extract the greatest possible wealth from the greatest possible number of people, does not seem to have much of an influence on containing the dominant ones’ greed, which seems boundless. In the last resort, they can always take even more wealth away from nature itself, before realizing that nature can only take so much filth (pollution) before it pushes back, killing off several million people per year (so far) through premature death and what is euphemistically called climate change (wildfires, floods and other assorted Biblical disasters). That for some “unfathomable” reason seem to kill a lot more people nowadays than they did back when human beings were considerably less numerous than they are now.
Which reminds me for all the world about a book published over forty years ago by a Parti-Québécois-government energy minister (since deceased) called Guy Joron, Minimum annual salary 1 million $, or The race toward madness. For which I promptly wrote an article back then in a left-liberal Canadian magazine (The Last Post) lambasting Joron for suggesting, without differentiating between the social classes, that modern society cannot just continue expanding ordinary economic growth into the stratosphere without somehow protecting the natural environment from total disaster. My idea was that though there was nothing whatever wrong with protecting nature, that should not simply be done by getting everyone to contribute “equally” to setting up a system of what is now called “negative growth” instead. Otherwise, the rich would just go on forever getting richer at the expense of the poor, who would have to end up paying the entire price of any resulting negative growth.
As it turns out, both of us were right. Joron’s book, originally published in French in 1976, was quite a prescient achievement after all, rightly anticipating exactly the kind of discussions about that subject currently dominating conversations all over the world. According to 99% of the world’s environmental scientists, we are now living in “the last decade” during which something could still be done to prevent enormously expanding fossil-fuel consumption from completely ruining the air, the water and the soil, thereby shortening everyone’s life expectancy by a long-lasting margin (which is to say, forever).
Back in the 1970s, some of us still thought that humanity was on the verge of discovering some kind of non-polluting alternative, such as fusion energy, which had already been “harnessed” in a destructive sort of way (the hydrogen bomb), but had not yet led to any kind of peaceful use. Nowadays, we have come to realize that no peace-loving fusion-power plants seem to be on the verge of starting up any time soon, nor is it likely that we will soon discover any other viable, alternative, “technological fixes” capable of providing for the needs of almost eight billion people (twice as many as back then). It seems instead that we finally have our collective backs up against the wall. Unless, of course, as many different people have been positing recently (even in popular films like “Elysium”), the minuscule elite of the entire world’s most important people can somehow overcome their own personal differences, and live together in some totally disconnected bunker (or space station), letting 99.99% of the world’s largely “superfluous” population just die out in the open air, soon to become completely toxic.
In the meantime, outside the (future) bunker walls, an increasingly large number of people are now claiming that we need something like a world-wide ecological revolution, in other words the adoption of “voluntary simplicity” on a gigantic scale, to do away with economic growth forever. Whatever the impact of doing that may turn out to be on billions of poorer, less powerful people, as well as on dozens of poorer, less powerful nations. But the people making such revolutionary proclamations are not being very realistic, to say the least.
Anyone seriously attempting to bring about such a total revolution would have to go a lot farther than just getting ordinary people to sign pledges to reduce their own personal “carbon footprints”, as well as putting pressure on today’s increasingly weak governments to pass merely theoretical anti-pollution laws, that can never really be enforced. Any attempt at a total revolution against everything that the world’s real rulers (major investors) have been doing to the rest of us for the past 500 years, would soon "oblige" the ultra-rich and the ultra-powerful people, in both the neoliberal and the neofascist “sectors”, to throw a financial temper tantrum the like of which no one has ever seen before. Thoroughly terrified governments and central banks would then undoubtedly turn that unprecedented crisis into a total rout, a Great Depression if you will, and no one anywhere would then be able to pay for education, or health, or transportation, or housing, or food for that matter, whether or not they lived in a more international, or in a more nationalist, economy. (Except for the “Elysium” group, if they ever succeed in pulling that off.)
Back on the planet Earth, any attempts on anyone’s part to finally do anything real about the natural environment would also inevitably disappear in the ensuing panic. Nature, of course, would then strike back a thousand times harder than before, much worse than in any of the very numerous “natural disasters”, that people all over the world are already having to put up with nowadays. Which means that in this not-very-far-in-the-future dystopia, military confrontation between states armed to the teeth would most likely all of a sudden become very popular everywhere, and not just located as it is nowadays in certain delimited parts of the world. Massive famines, massive epidemics and megadeath on an unprecedented scale would probably soon follow, putting the survival of the human race itself back on the agenda, just like it was back in the Cold War, the same historical period that I was writing about at the beginning of this blogpost. (Once again, except for the “Elysium” gang, if we let them get away with it.)
