Everything is systemic

According to Chad Wolf, Donald Trump’s acting Secretary of Homeland Security, there is no systemic racism in the USA. The premier of Québec, François Legault, has also once again made the same statement about how racism in Québec is not systemic either. He seems to think that this is true because most people in Québec are not openly racist and because his government is officially opposed to all forms of racism. A very similar point of view, about the total absence of systemic racism throughout Canada was also expressed recently by Stockwell Day, who used to be a minister in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. His comments caused such a furore that he decided to resign from his post in the English-Canadian media and to give up his place as a board member in a couple of well-known Canadian corporations.

Unfortunately, the same kind of negative reaction has yet to befall either Chad Wolf or François Legault. What happened to Stockwell Day in Canada could never happen to any top-level US administrator like Chad Wolf, however, for at least as long as Donald Trump remains in power. His white-supremacist way of dealing with mass demonstrations against racism is to completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters, and to fan the flames of repression by calling out the US Army instead. The goal being to “help” the police forces deal with the minuscule minority of looters and arsonists, who are destroying “decent people’s” private property, by shooting them all down dead! More or less in the same way that the Minneapolis police dealt with George Floyd on May 25, and other police forces, not only in the USA but also in Canada, have dealt with other minority victims since then. Which is leading many observers in the Disunited States of America to wonder if that country is not in for a new version of the Civil War, with the Republican Party playing the role of the Confederacy this time around.

Trump thinks that “law and order” means the violent repression of non-white minorities, which is a distinctly barbarian way of interpreting that expression. A more civilized approach to law and order, though still far from ideal, would be the British way of dealing with guns, which are simply banned for civilian use altogether, except for the hunting of wild animals in extremely limited conditions. Guns in the UK are mostly reserved for the military, because the UK still completely supports militarism (NATO, etc.), but inside that country even the vast majority of the police forces do not carry guns. Another good example of what law and order should mean, in a completely different context, comes from several East Asian countries, where face masks are compulsory for people circulating in public, when dealing with a pandemic caused by a contagious, respiratory illness. A third example of civilized law and order would be forcing the world’s richest people, and their private corporations, to pay much higher rates of taxation than poor people do, by shutting down every last one of their tax evasion schemes worldwide. It is no accident that the Trump barbarian most definitely does not support any of those civilized ideas.

As for François Legault, he still seems to be riding out the media storm, on the grounds that admitting the existence of systemic racism in his province would mean participating in the kind of “Québec bashing” that has always been the hallmark of the neocolonial federalists running the Canadian government. But the fact that the majority of people, as well as the governments, of many different countries in this world are not openly racist does not prevent any of those places from nevertheless practising systemic racism. Legault’s deliberately wishy-washy definition could even apply to the USA itself, at least during the period when Barack Obama was president of that country.

Whereas being systemic really means having to do with the entire system, indicating that the way that an overall society is set up inevitably leads to a given result. The fact that black people in the USA are proportionately much more likely than white people to be poverty-stricken, to be unemployed, to be in prison, or to get murdered by the police for no reason at all, is what being systemic is all about. All of those things are also happening in Québec, and in the rest of Canada as well, even though the USA’s systemic racism is carried out on a much larger scale, most of the time in a much more “in-your-face” manner.

In reality, every country in the world should take this opportunity to reflect on what systemic racism really means. ‘Races’ as such do not exist in any scientific sense, but racist people do not care all that much about science. When Barack Obama was in office, the USA considered him to be its “first black president”, rather than accepting the fact that he was just as much a white president as a black president, deliberately forgetting what his mother looked like, and where her ancestors came from. The same kind of peculiar choice of words is also exemplified in the US habit of talking about non-whites as being ‘coloured’ people, as if white were not a skin colour just like all the other ones. However, systemic racism does not exist only in the USA, nor does it exist only in the Western world (North America, Europe, Australasia), as is claimed by some extremely misguided, ‘post-colonial’, ideologues. It is also just as present everywhere else in the world as well.

During the Cold War, the only theoretically ‘communist’ countries, such as the USSR and China, had enormous difficulties explaining to their ‘Third World’ allies why it was that so many of the visitors from those countries were so often treated in a racist manner by their hosts. Which was simply an extension of the way in which the dominant ethnic groups in those countries, the Russians and the Han, treated their own ethnic minorities. As did all the other officially ‘communist’ countries, in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America. Black people, indigenous people and ‘different-looking’ people in general are even more often shunned and mistreated nowadays in those same regions than they were then.

This is the case not only in the former ‘communist’ countries, but also in the dozens of countries run by dominant ethnic groups put into power by most of the non-communist, national-liberation movements in almost all the other Asian, African and Latin American countries. Regardless of the year in which each one of those countries became independent. Just like in the Western world, some of those nations treat their minorities a lot worse than do some of the others, but in my opinion no particular country really stands out as a place that does not practise systemic racism at all. Human beings all over the world have a very long way to go in this regard.

It is also extremely important to realize that the systemic nature of racism applies just as much to all the other reactionary ideologies in this world as well, such as imperialism and ethnic exclusivism, with which racism is often closely aligned. Sexism, elitism, extractivism, religious fundamentalism, militarism, neoliberalism and neofascism are also high on the list of the world’s most dangerous, atavistic ideologies, and all of them are also eminently systemic in nature. Even more important than the systemic character of all those ideologies is the fact that they are also very much intertwined one with the other. Each one of them helps to prop up all the other ones, and it is impossible to seriously fight against just one of those ultra-right-wing ideologies without fighting against all of them at the same time.

Any movement, such as the anti-racist movement, that attempts to get somewhere, seeking to make the world a much better place in which to live, will tie itself up into knots if it tries to succeed by focusing exclusively on its own immediate target. The same thing goes for anti-sexism, anti-elitism, anti-imperialism, the peace movement and all the other progressive movements. They are all up against the whole panoply of mutually sustaining, antediluvian ideologies, even if the people belonging to those progressive movements do not always seem to be aware of the fact that those same reactionary systems always support each other.

Unfortunately, people in every part of the world, even many of those who participate regularly in anti-racist movements, often contribute to other forms of social discrimination, such as sexism, at the same time. Thereby significantly reducing the positive effect of their anti-racism in the fight for overall social equality. Racial equality can never be attained if it is accompanied  by anti-feminist sexism, for the obvious reason that half the people of any particular skin colour in the world are female. Deliberately backward people like Donald Trump tend to display both their racism and their sexism quite openly, making them obvious targets for the anti-racist and anti-sexist movements, at the same time.

But if today’s anti-racist demonstrators want to genuinely succeed in their efforts, they will also have to repudiate the mistakes made in the past from within their own movements, as when one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party infamously proclaimed, way back when, that the position of women in his organization was prone! The fact that women were actually quite active and influential in the BPP, in spite of such openly idiotic statements, did not diminish very much the negative effect of such declarations on the uninitiated general public, white and black. Even the USA’s most prominent anti-racist icon, Martin Luther King, Junior, left himself open for attack in this regard by his repeated philandering. King understood quite well that racism was very closely related to the elitist domination of ‘inferior’ social classes, a stance that resulted in his being assassinated just before leading a Poor People’s March on Washington. But by his own admission, he was not nearly as lucid about his attitudes toward women.

Back in the 1960s, very few of the people involved in politics, not only old-fashioned, conservative-minded people and wishy-washy liberals but also many of those engaged in progressive politics, were any more lucid about women’s liberation, a situation that only began slowly changing during the 1970s. In Québec for example, most of the union leaders in the 1960s still felt that their almost exclusively male members should be getting higher pay from their employers, not only for the usual reasons, but also so that the women in their lives could stay home and take care of the children, rather than having to work for wages alongside their menfolk. Equal pay for equal work was not then a part of the trade-union agenda.

In a similar sort of way, Trump’s racism is much more obvious than the racism practised by more discreet leaders nowadays, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Who pretends to be both anti-racist and anti-sexist, but does not turn out to be genuinely committed to either of those goals. Trudeau has been in power for the past five years without yet having done anything at all to provide adequate drinking water to dozens of indigenous communities in Canada that have always lacked such facilities. Even when doing exactly that was supposed to have been his government’s “number one top priority” from the very beginning. Lip-service toward fighting racism, as well as fighting against any other form of reactionary behaviour, such as sexism, has always been the main characteristic of discreetly liberal regimes like Trudeau’s government.

Insincere opposition to sexism, however, has also been practised over the years by many of the male-dominated leaderships of Canada’s ‘First Nations’ of aboriginal peoples. Until quite recently, the vast majority of the band councils in most Canadian indigenous communities supported a rule, initially introduced by the neocolonial Canadian government, that excluded indigenous women married to non-indigenous men from belonging to each individual nation, while simultaneously accepting as members men married to non-indigenous women. Which is certainly not the right way to go about fighting for social equality. That rule has since been rescinded, but the mistreatment of indigenous women by indigenous men, in dozens of other ways, is every bit as widespread in those communities as it is in the non-indigenous part of the Canadian population.

Elitism is also just as systemic as racism and sexism, the basis of elitist domination of society being the fundamental division of all the currently existing cultures into social classes. In fact, the systemic domination of what are called ‘superior’ classes of people over so-called ‘inferior’ classes of people quite often subsumes both racism and sexism. In the very real sense that the lowest classes of any given society almost always tend to include larger percentages of people who are treated as if they were either racially or sexually ‘inferior’ to self-designated ‘superior’ people. Or both at the same time, non-white women being disproportionately assigned to jobs considered to be the lowest of the low, such as serving as orderlies in long-term care centres. In other words, it is completely impossible to get rid of systemic racism, anywhere at all, if people do not simultaneously get rid of sexism and elitism as well.

Liberal-minded regimes, such as the one run by Trudeau in Canada, or the one run by Legault in Québec, or the one run a few years ago by Obama in the USA, or the one currently run by Emmanuel Macron in France, are not capable of passing the litmus test of anti-elitism. Their only superficial opposition to racism and to sexism falls apart just as soon as someone underlines the fact that their all-out, pro-capitalist support for social-class elitism never seems to work in a non-sexist way, such as when it comes to genuinely preventing non-white women from dominating the lowest ranks of the social ladder. ML King pulled the rug out from under the feet of the liberal fakers of the past, part of the way, when he emphasized racism’s reliance on elitism, but he unfortunately ‘forgot’ to underline the same kind of linkage that sexism has always had with both racism and elitism.

Neoliberalism is also very much a leading, thoroughly reactionary, and systemic ideology. This is an ideology currently promoting the social interests of the world’s most important private investors, or capitalists. As a social class, private capitalists first came into being in human society about 500 years ago, during the long-drawn-out decline of aristocratic feudalism in Europe, contributing their ‘economic expertise’ to the mercantilist expansion of Western imperialism across the rest of the world. During the industrial revolution that began during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the doctrine of economic and social liberalism, or laissez-faire, promoted by private capitalism, emerged as a fully developed ideology dedicated to making sure that the ‘nouveaux riches’ would henceforth take over the entire state apparatus and exploit all the ‘inferior’ classes of society, such as the industrial workers, for their almost exclusive benefit.

However, during the so-called neomercantilist period, from about the 1880s to the 1980s, the nouveaux riches were forced to tolerate the existence of anti-capitalist trade unions and anti-imperialist movements in the colonies. Both of which profited from the political crises created by inter-imperialist rivalry, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of state capitalism in the Soviet bloc. But that tendency was itself reversed during the early 1980s, when old-fashioned, private-capitalist, laissez-faire morphed into neoliberalism, and succeeded in re-imposing the domination of private capitalism in many different parts of the world. Complete with free trade and private-sector globalization, massive tax evasion and equally massive political corruption, weak or non-existent trade unions, neocolonial collaboration with imperialism, and so on. In other words, a ‘brave new world’ based on unlimited economic growth to be gained exclusively through the maximization of ultra-individualist, short-term (quarter-year) profit for every private, multinational investor rich enough to participate in that ‘open conspiracy’.

Austerity programs were also re-introduced in all the countries under neoliberal control, resulting in the widespread dilution, or wholesale dismantling, of most of the more or less social-democratic health, education and welfare programs that had been gradually set up during the neomercantilist period. The general idea being to make sure that almost all the wealth in the world, from the 1980s to the present, would go exclusively toward satisfying ‘shareholder rights’, rather than the rights of any of the other, only theoretical, ‘stakeholders’. While simultaneously convincing all the world’s ‘inferior’ people, not rich enough to belong to the rogues gallery of major investors, that they would also eventually gain something from the ‘trickle-down effect’ of all that privatized wealth. An empty political promise that none of the neoliberal corporations and their subordinated governments ever intended to respect.

Neoliberal capitalism also decided to reinforce another extremely destructive force known as extractivism, that had already been established in every industrialized country, as well as throughout the colonial and postcolonial world, to provide the raw materials for the ever-expanding industrial revolution. Not only for the first phase of the industrial revolution, largely based on coal and steam-power, but also for the second, third and fourth phases of technological development, resulting in today’s world of cybernetics and the mining of ‘big data’ drawn from the entire population, as if human beings were just another ‘natural resource’. All of those phases depending very heavily on a world-wide system concentrating on the physical extraction of raw materials and sources of power, scouring the planet in a constantly expanding search for ever greater quantities of industrial inputs. In order to provide constantly expanding sources of corporate profit, at the expense of the natural environment, and at the expense of all the ‘inferior’ social classes in every country.

The only world-system currently existing that sometimes seems to be competing with private capitalism for total control over everything is the system of state capitalism, with government bureaucrats, rather than private investors, running thousands of nationalized, or non-market, firms. Some of those state-capitalist firms were set up in former ‘communist’ nations, such as the People’s Republic of China, while other kinds of state capitalism were also founded in religious theocracies, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. These different kinds of state capitalism will be dealt with in greater detail in the upcoming paragraphs about imperialism and religious fundamentalism, but it is important to emphasize here that all those state-capitalist regimes are also very heavily invested in private capitalism and neoliberalism at the same time. Their ‘non-market’ firms, like their ‘pro-market’ firms, are not being used in a civilized, social-democratic way, in order to provide social services for the general population. They are simply being used by the ruling bureaucracies in a barbarian, or neofascist, way to benefit a small number of egotistical rulers. Who run those firms in the same way that private-profit corporations are run, by excluding any input from the vast majority of the population, belonging to ‘inferior’ social classes.

All those state-capitalist empires, like all the private-capitalist empires, treat the natural environment in the same destructive, extractive manner. As a result, they all collectively create massive quantities of air pollution, water pollution and soil pollution, through excessive reliance on fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture focused on growth hormones and antibiotics, and ‘waste management’ based on throwing away millions of tons of products using ‘planned obsolescence’, such as one-time-use plastics. Feeble attempts are being made at appearing to ‘do something’ about environmental problems, such as fixing theoretical limits on the ‘degrees’ of climate change that ‘the international community’ is allowed to tolerate during each passing year. But somehow the individual goals of each private-capitalist corporation, or each state-capitalist bureaucracy, always take precedence over any of those phoney limits.

Unfortunately for the future of the human race, ‘Gaia’ (the natural world) is fighting back in its own indomitable way. Such as by transferring to people pathogens never before encountered by human beings, from wild animals being sold in ‘wet’ markets in countries like China. That is to say wherever the constant expansion of the human population presses ever closer to animal habitats that had previously been located far away from human habitations. And thereby forcing many different countries into using medieval strategies like social distancing in order to control the number of victims from those new-found pathogens, with enormous negative consequences to the world economy. In other words, if all the reactionary ideologies do not succeed in controlling world population expansion in the near future, ecological collapse will do the job instead.

While we all sit around waiting for that particular catastrophe to happen, we continue to further pollute our own nest by reinforcing several other reactionary ideologies, such as religious bigotry. Which has also been revived recently in a systemic way throughout the world of human beings, particularly but not exclusively in places ruled by fundamentalist forms of religion, known as theocracies. Atavistic religious belief often intersects with ethnic exclusivism and racism, an example of which being the evangelical-christian electoral base of the USA’s Donald Trump. Who insisted on showing off a Bible to the television cameras when he did his photo-op in front of a church across the street from the White House, right after the murder of George Floyd. Trump’s childish, in-your-face method of combining religious bigotry and racism should not lead anyone to think, however, that all the other religious fundamentalists in the world do not just as often practise the same kind of overlap with racism and ethnic exclusivism.

Another extreme example being the Islamic State movement, which regularly takes a great deal of pride, and perverse pleasure, in doing the same kind of thing as often as possible, using severed heads instead of Bibles as props in their own photo-ops. Similarly, although in a much less violent way, Muslim women practising so-called ‘voluntary slavery’, such as by wearing religious-inspired cover-up clothing, are also contributing to anti-feminist sexism whenever they appear in public. No matter how stridently they may claim to have the individualist ‘right’ to be anti-feminist, more or less in the same way that ‘scabs’ (strikebreakers) claim to have the individualist ‘right’ to fight against the union movement. Individualism, as we saw earlier, forms part of the barbarian, neoliberal way of looking at the world, and is unrelated to any kind of genuine progressivism.

But Christianity and Islam are not the only religions that are fundamentally reactionary, from a systemic point of view. Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism and all the other leading religions in the world are also in the same camp, even if some of their believers pretend to be both religious and progressive at the same time. The systemic nature of religious faith, however, is constantly undermining every attempt at straddling the enormous divide between progressive politics and reactionary politics, just like anti-racist movements are always undermined whenever they choose to support sexism or elitism.

Here in Québec, the latest flare-up of race war south of the border has also revived the long-lasting debate between the holier-than-thou people who always pretend that racism here (and in the rest of Canada) is not systemic like in the USA, and those more honest people who realize that even though racism here may not always be as obvious, and as violent, as it has always been in the largest North American country, it is nevertheless profoundly systemic. There is no doubt about the fact that white supremacy in Québec, and in Canada, is strongly supported by the prevailing political, economic, social and cultural system. Black people, indigenous people and most of the other racial minorities do not just happen to find themselves much more often (proportionately) than white people at the bottom of the social heap, just by accident. Just like poor women do not just happen to also end up on the bottom of society, whenever sexism intersects with elitism.

Since the conquest of New France by the British Empire in the eighteenth century, the francophone Québécois (of both sexes) have always been downtrodden, in comparison with anglophone Canadians. Even in today’s Québec, the francophone majority (about 80% of the overall population of more than eight million), while considerably richer now than it was as recently as the 1950s, is still significantly poorer than the anglophone average in the rest of Canada. At the same time, Québec’s anglophone ‘national minority’, that used to be dominated exclusively by people of British origin, has recently absorbed quite a large number of anglophones coming from all sorts of other places, such as former British colonies in the ‘Third World’ (Asia, Africa and Latin America).

Premier Legault’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism here led to a situation in which many of the black anglophone protesters demonstrating against the murder of George Floyd in the USA did not seem any more inclined than Legault was to try to reach out to the ‘other side’, in this case the Québec majority, and therefore to include a significant francophone presence in their marches. Or on their protest signs, which were almost exclusively written in English. In spite of the fact that the francophone section of the black minority in Québec is really quite large, especially because of the ultra-downtrodden Haitian contingent, now well over 250 000 people. The pro-independence Parti Québécois, which used to be in power regularly but is now a much smaller political force than it was before, is currently trying to reconstruct the independence movement by including non-white francophones much more than it ever used to do in the past. Under the leadership of the new party president, Dieudonné Ella Oyono, who was born in Gabon, one of the former French colonies in Africa.

It is not going to be easy, however, for the new PQ president to rally most of the francophone population of Québec into this much more inclusive independence movement, given the current electoral strength of Premier Legault, particularly among white francophones. Legault, himself a former PQ minister, founded his own party, the ‘Coalition Avenir Québec’, in 2011, after having given up on the independence movement altogether. The current debate over systemic racism, directed against such minorities as black people in Québec, indigenous people, as well as various Asian minorities, has underlined the incredible weakness of the provincial government’s ultra-timid approach to anti-racism.

Québec itself is one of several ‘sociological nations’ throughout the world that has never, or at least rarely, succeeded in running its own independent nation-state, more or less in the same category as Catalonia, or Scotland, or Corsica. Or even the dozens of similarly mistreated territories to be found throughout the formerly-colonized ‘Third World’, such as the anglophone region of the dominantly francophone African nation of Cameroun. Most of the francophone Québécois are also white people, just like most of the English-Canadians living in Québec, both of which groups do not suffer from anything like the kinds of systemic racism that downtrodden minorities of both sexes, in Canada and in Québec, have to put up with all the time. Although the vast majority of ordinary Québécois are not barbarians like Donald Trump, some ultra-right-wing, racist individuals in Québec may also be suffering from a form of exclusivism similar to that exhibited by the so-called ‘poor white trash’ in the USA. Where extreme poverty sometimes induces particularly immoral individuals to deliberately mistreat black or indigenous people, so that the poor white populists will not be the ones ending up at the very bottom of the social ladder.

The white, francophone majority in Québec, however, along with non-white francophones, nevertheless suffers from a form of mostly anglophone, Canadian imperialism that fights against the Québec independence movement by considering the ‘French-speaking Canadians’ in Québec as being just another minority ethnic group governed from Ottawa. For example, during the Oka crisis of 1990, also known as the Mohawk Resistance, a violent territorial dispute broke out between a francophone town northwest of Montréal, supported by the Québec government and the provincial police force, and the nearby indigenous, English-speaking, community of Kanesatake. That conflict led to a 78-day armed stand-off that only ended after the intervention of the Canadian Army. The federal government treated the whole thing as a conflict between two rival, Canadian ethnic groups, an attitude that was not shared, to say the least, by either the Québécois or the Mohawks.

At the same time, Canada as a whole also suffers from the deleterious effects of US imperialism, as exemplified in dozens of different kinds of national humiliation over the years, such as the North American free trade deal, recently ‘improved’ (from the USA’s point of view) by Donald Trump’s regime. Which does not prevent white people in both Canada and Québec from practising systemic racism, as well as neocolonialism directed against the indigenous minorities in both countries. The black protesters brandishing their English-language signs in Québec, as well as the French-language government of Québec, are both using colonial languages, so far as the indigenous peoples are concerned. Which are also colonial languages among most of the ‘Third World’ nations, which also continue to use European languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, nowadays.

Imperialism is also one of the reactionary, systemic ideologies that exist alongside racism, sexism, elitism, fundamentalism and so on, constantly interacting with all the others. Once again, even though this article is focused on the USA, Canada and Québec, imperialism is also very much a worldwide phenomenon. It is not at all restricted to Western imperialism, that colonized very large sections of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific islands (including Australia), between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, as some foolish, ‘post-colonial’ ideologues imagine. The first empires were founded about 5000 years ago, long before the concept of the ‘Western world’ was invented, and continued to exist alongside, and even within, the regions also colonized by European imperialism and by US imperialism. White and non-white empires continue to exist nowadays, with the revived Chinese empire very much in the business of trying to replace the tired, but still powerful, US empire as the dominant force in the world today.

Which means that anti-racist movements all over the world, as well as anti-sexist movements, and anti-elitist (democratic socialist) movements, cannot possibly succeed in eliminating the systemic nature of any of those reactionary ideologies without simultaneously taking on imperialism as well. Once again, not only US imperialism and European imperialism, nor only the somewhat less obvious forms of imperialism and neocolonialism that nevertheless exist inside ‘settler nations’ such as Canada and Québec. In order to succeed worldwide, the anti-racist movements (and all the other related movements) also have to take on Chinese imperialism, Russian imperialism, Japanese imperialism and all the other forms of imperialism also being practised by somewhat less powerful countries such as India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and so on.

Racism is not only systemic because of its interaction with sexism and elitism, but also very much because of its interaction with imperialism. And with the kind of ethnic exclusivism currently practised by dozens of ruling parties all over the world, even in some of the smaller nations, such as Myanmar or Hungary. Ethnic exclusivism is just another reactionary ideology that, like imperialism and religious fundamentalism, currently fuels the rise of neofascism on every continent. For its part, today’s neofascism is a lot like its predecessor, the ‘classical’ fascism of the twentieth century, not only because they both rely on ethnic exclusivism and religious fanaticism in order to survive.

But also because both fascism and neofascism were and are divided up into several different kinds of practitioners, some of them often appearing to be more or less ferocious than others. For example, the full-fledged fascism of Nazi Germany can be contrasted with the somewhat less ferocious fascism of the New Life Movement and the Blue Shirt youth movement, sponsored by Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-chek) inside the Chinese Nationalist Party. In a somewhat similar way in which the neofascism of the Islamic State movement gives the impression of being considerably more ferocious than is the neofascism of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, at least at the moment. Which could all simply be ideological illusions based on the relative strength, or weakness, of either form of fascism within its overall historical context.

Which brings us to militarism, closely associated with all the different forms of imperialism, but which is also substantially practised by all sorts of countries, including even several dozen nations that do not seem powerful enough to successfully practise any kind of regional imperialism. Huge countries like the USA, Russia and China (especially the USA) spend enormous quantities of money every year on maintaining and developing extremely expensive weapons systems, which help to prevent those countries from being able to spend a great deal more money on fulfilling the health, education and welfare needs of the general population, instead. But ‘middle powers’ like Canada also spend far too much money on contributing to military forms of waste, as well as upholding the military alliances (such as NATO) and the reactionary foreign policies of their favourite ‘big brothers’ (the USA in Canada’s case). People in the peace movement have never been able to persuade the leaders of such countries to give up their own reactionary obsessions.

In spite of all this reactionary behaviour, a lot of progressive-minded people in many different countries nowadays feel that we currently have an opportunity to really make a major change in human society right now. Some think that the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 crisis has induced millions of people from all walks of life to avoid going back to the old ways of doing things, and just start polluting everything again the way we used to do before the latest coronavirus started killing off millions of people. Some of those same people also think that the anti-racist movement, recently revived in the USA and in many other countries right after the murder of George Floyd, will dovetail with the COVID crisis to also reinforce the popular will not to go back to any of the old ways of doing things. They also point to the ‘Me-Too’ movement that started up in the USA after the Harvey Weinstein scandal of 2017 as another major contributing factor in convincing everyone not to accept any more the kind of thinking that used to be accepted as recently as several years ago.

It is certainly very welcome news indeed for those of us who participated in progressive movements during the 1960s and the 1970s to realize how much the current revival of some of those movements resembles some of the things that were going on fifty years ago. But the worst thing that can happen now in all the progressive movements is that current militants become complacent, and start believing that this time everything is going to be different. As I pointed out in the past few pages, all the reactionary forces in human society are still incredibly strong and will not simply go away and disappear without an enormous fight.

There are currently several hundred thousand people all over the world demonstrating against systemic racism. And the leaders of the anti-racist movement are quite active also, cautioning everyone against the idea of accepting only minor changes in society, such as the partial defunding of police forces and the transfer of some of that money to more progressive ways of dealing with minor lawbreaking. Or thinking that “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions”, like the one set up in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was in power, or the one set up in Canada in 2008 to supposedly “solve the problem” of century-old residential schools for indigenous people, could actually make a major difference. Or the equally inadequate idea of appointing a few thousand upper-class figureheads belonging to minority populations to token government positions, or of appointing a few thousand upper-class women to the executive boards of major corporations.

In every aspect of society, whether it’s the natural environment, racial equality, gender equality, equality between the social classes, equality between all the world’s nations, de-militarizing the whole world, and so on, truly significant, long-lasting progress cannot be any less systemic than the original situation itself. In order to get rid of systemic racism, for example, it’s not a few hundred thousand people demonstrating in several countries, during several months, that will help to get rid of the problem, but hundreds of millions of people demonstrating in every country, all over the world, during several decades. The fact is that there are still far too many people out there who are practising dozens of different kinds of complicity instead, helping the world’s tiny elite of ultra-rich, ultra-powerful people remain in power, by refusing to change any of the old ways of doing things. Sometimes without even realizing the full extent of the negative effects of their reactionary complicity.

What we really need is to merge all the progressive movements into one gigantic, worldwide force capable of imposing an alternative society on all the people in power, and their complicit allies. People all over the world would have to agree to fully support every one of the goals outlined in this blogpost, to get rid of the world’s most important, reactionary ideologies, and to convince their barbarian sponsors to give up trying to dominate everyone else, and the natural environment, once and for all. This would require worldwide, permanent mobilization of hundreds of millions of people, ready to do whatever it takes, during the next several decades,  to bring about all those enormous changes simultaneously.

The least that can be said at this point in time, however, is that the human race does not seem to be anywhere near doing any of those things right now. It is one thing for millions of people to want to get rid of systemic racism, systemic sexism, systemic elitism, systemic extractivism, systemic religious fundamentalism, systemic neoliberalism, systemic imperialism, systemic ethnic exclusivism, systemic neofascism and systemic militarism. It is quite another thing to really accomplish any of those objectives. Or to accomplish all of them together, since each one is just a particular aspect of each other form of reaction.