Complacency is a form of denial
Far too many naive, liberal-minded people these days are reacting to what seems to them to be very good news, such as the fact that Joe Biden has become the president-elect of the USA rather than Donald Trump, or the fact that a couple of huge pharmaceutical corporations have apparently discovered vaccines that could, in the event that everything works out exactly as announced by those companies, help save at least some people from the current pandemic. Starting, of course, with the world’s richest countries, and continuing much later (if at all) with a few of the world’s poorer countries. As a result, these easily satisfied optimists have decided to stop feeling morose and to start feeling good again, as if a few tidbits of what may or may not be good news (depending on where one lives), somehow prove that everything is okay again in (their part of) the world.
According to them, we are all on our way now toward a wonderful recovery not only from self-centred, isolationist politics and exponential increases in dishonesty, but also from high mortality rates (depending on social class) and an unfortunate economic depression caused by horrendous public health confinement strategies. So now they feel that “we” can all get back to what they consider to be “normal” democracy, “always beneficial” international cooperation, increasing longevity “for everyone”, and uninterrupted economic growth, just like “we” used to enjoy before those unfortunate, but temporary, setbacks got in the way of “our” (their) long-term happiness.
It ought to be obvious, however, that a return to liberal normalcy in the US presidential elections, albeit by a very slender margin, is nothing to get excited about all by itself. In the first place, the USA no longer possesses nearly the kind of influence it used to enjoy in this world, which means that the weakening of only one of the world’s leading autocrats, even one as disgusting as Trump (or his ultra-ambitious deputy, Mike Pompeo), is not going to have a major impact on all the other authoritarian regimes in this world.
It is also absurd for liberal-minded people outside the US to claim that very few countries are in as rotten a situation as the USA is in today, given the fact that most of the countries in this world are run by long-established dictators, who do not give a fig about most of the people living under their control. A few of those dictators run rival empires, very poorly most of the time. But most of the world’s weaker countries, exploited by foreign firms coming from industrialized countries hunting for raw materials, are governed by even more miserable, tin-pot dictators who are only capable of thoroughly mistreating their own long-suffering populations to death, with no influence at all beyond their own borders.
In the current circumstances, however, even if Biden (and the rest of his country) manages to survive the scorched-earth policy of the Republican reactionaries (and its ultra-right-wing friends in countries like Israel) until the January inauguration, none of the president-elect’s recent declarations, about abandoning his “former” neoliberal elitism in favour of a more inclusive attitude toward the majority of the US population, are very convincing. The Democratic Party chose Joe Biden as their candidate, not Bernie Sanders nor any of the other, left-liberal personalities in that organization, in order to make it possible for the establishment majority in that party to win the election over an extremely popular, ultra-right-wing opponent.
But the juvenile delinquents in the Trump camp still retain the capacity to block every move that a mainstream politician like Biden could possibly make, toward using the US government to get the pandemic under control before it kills everyone off, or to re-boot the national economy in a slightly more egalitarian way. In spite of Trump’s ridiculous claims about the Democratic Party being dominated by non-existent “ultra-leftists”, none of the mildly socialist minority faction inside that party will ever do anything to jeopardize Biden’s extremely centrist mandate.
The ultra-right-wing, laissez-faire numbskulls in the Republican Party, in their ideological ignorance, will still continue to deliberately reject any government action on behalf of ordinary (non-rich) people as a form of (heaven forbid) socialism. This goes not only for the half neoliberal, half neofascist, Republican side of the Senate and the House of Representatives, but also for the very similar, ultra-conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which quite recently ruled in favour of ultra-orthodox religious fanatics opposed to the anti-pandemic interventions of the state of New York.
For its part, the US constitution has once again been interpreted in a very political way, just like all the other constitutions in all the other countries in the world, which are constantly being rebooted according to the political considerations of every succeeding period of history. In the USA, the emoluments section of the very same constitution, condemning foreign gifts for acting presidents, has been ignored ever since that illustrious document was originally ratified, with the current president recently becoming the worst offender ever since he took office (with foreign help). People all over the world, ordinary politicians as well as eminent jurists, only worry about what is written down in constitutions when they feel like it.
As a former Québec finance minister, Nicolas Marceau, pointed out recently in a Montréal newspaper, the social mobility of “the American dream” is much more evident in countries that more often use government action in a positive way, as in Québec for example (“La mobilité sociale, un rève américain ou québécois?”, “Social mobility, an American dream or a Québécois one?”, in “Le Devoir”, November 14, 2020). The particularly enormous income gap in the USA, caused by forty years of exceptionally intense neoliberalism, resulted in making a very large portion of the US population feel completely left out of society.
Biden himself participated in this kind of anti-democratic ultra-capitalism by defending the super-huge US credit-card companies against government attempts at controlling their excesses, while his running mate Kamala Harris also protected many of the major banks from popular reaction while acting as attorney general in California during the 2008 subprime crisis. Liberal-minded people outside the USA, who identify with mainstream Democrats like the Clintons and Obama, consider Biden and Harris to be “leftists”, which is not true at all. In the real world, they are merely traditional right-wing politicians, who only seem to be leftists, or centrists, in comparison with all those extremely backward neo-nazis in the Trump camp.
The enormous excesses of the entire neoliberal movement, controlling the US government since Ronald Reagan took power forty years ago, provoked an ultra-right-wing populist reaction among the totally neglected, industrial working-class, similar to the one that also took place in dozens of other countries, such as Russia. In the USA, this took the form of ultra-individualist hero-worshiping of anti-social billionaire Donald Trump, whose total rejection of government action to help ordinary people in distress simply made the plight of those left behind by private-sector deindustrialization even worse than it already was in the beginning.
Trump supporters’ neofascist, self-centred reaction against the “deep state”, however, only benefited the big-business executives who caused the problem in the first place, when they started back in the 1980s shipping millions of industrial jobs overseas, especially to equally neoliberal/neofascist China. Donald Trump, supported by a huge religious lobby promoting the idiotic, nineteenth-century, Pentecostal slogan of “God helps those who help themselves”, succeeded in turning a large section of recently impoverished workers, from a potential threat to the future of capitalist society, into a political weapon to be used against the rest of the USA’s population.
This huge portion of the mostly white working-class gobbled up Trump’s ultra-conservative attack on all the minority “races”, as well as denigrating such century-old, economically and socially positive practises as letting women leave “their traditional place” in the home and continue to enter the workforce alongside the men, even more than before. All of which is just an updated version of John Steinbeck’s observation back in the 1930s, about the majority of US workers seeing themselves not as exploited proletarians, like in all the other countries in the world, but as really just (racist and sexist) fake “millionaires” suffering from a “temporary cash-flow problem”.
A thoroughly reactionary attitude that was made even worse in the USA (as in many other Western countries) by the presence of millions of immigrants fleeing from totalitarian, falsely “communist” countries, starting with the “White Russians” after the 1917 Soviet revolution, continuing on with the East Europeans of the 1950s, all the way down to the anti-Castro Cubans and the anti-Chavez Venezuelans of more recent decades. Quite a few of those immigrants having been directly involved in neo-nazi movements in their home countries, before going on to massively support successive, ultra-conservative, Republican politicians in the USA, culminating in the worst of them all, Donald Trump and his gang of ultra-right-wing sycophants.
French economist Thomas Picketty, the author of two important books on the extremely egotistical functioning of the world’s most important financiers during the entire history of capitalism, has also been highly critical of the way that neoliberal governments and central banks have continued to deliberately increase the already enormous income gap between the social classes, rather than taking positive action to reduce that gap instead. They have not only continued to promote artificial inflation through so-called “quantitative easing” (buying up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of private financial debt), but also by offering the lowest possible interest rates so as to “incentivize” the world’s richest owners of wealth into investing huge amounts of capital in order to restore economic growth after the pandemic. The only result of which is to transfer all that debt onto the backs of those ordinary (i.e., not rich) people, who do not have the same capacity as the millionaire/billionaire owners and managers of the huge banks and corporations possess, to move their assets into one, or several, of the world’s most important fiscal paradises.
Picketty thinks that those forms of “hyper-capitalism” should be replaced by what he calls “participatory socialism”, a genuinely inclusive strategy that he believes would be completely different from the state capitalism of the totalitarian “communist” regimes that used to exist during the Cold War. According to him, the horrible results of the 2008 financial crisis and the current pandemic crisis should have pushed the world’s governments into adopting policies that would be good for everyone, not just for the tiny elite of ultra-rich people. He predicts that an ongoing succession of crises over the next several decades (more major recessions, new pandemics and a constantly intensified ecological crisis) will eventually result in such a welcome change of attitude. Nothing currently happening, however, seems to me to justify even that kind of extremely limited optimism. The zero-sum attitudes of the private and the state capitalists alike ensure that, from their mountaintop point of view, none of the “inferior” social classes should be allowed to possess much of anything, lest that take away from the “superior” social classes necessary possession of almost everything.
The prolific Québec non-fiction author, Alain Deneault, is also convinced that nothing good seems to be coming out of humanity’s reaction to the coronavirus tragedy. In a recent article (“Retour à l’anormal”) (“The return to abnormal behaviour”, “Le Devoir”, November 17, 2020), Deneault was quite adamant in insisting on the fact that the pandemic has not changed anything for the better. Everything that was being done wrongly over the past several decades, such as neoliberal concentration on exclusively short-term profit, the ongoing destruction of the natural environment in a thousand different ways, the popular gobbling up of hyper-transformed, obesity-producing, fast foods, and all the other aberrations, has not been repudiated in any way since the pandemic began. Quite the contrary.
Deneault got a taste of what it means to criticize totalitarian capitalism when, along with co-authors Delphine Abadie and William Sacher, he was successfully condemned in court by a Canadian mining company (Barrick Gold) back in 2008, and forced to destroy all the copies of his first book, as well as not being allowed to print any more of them, forever. Simply because that book, “Noir Canada: pillage, criminalité et corruption en Afrique”, denounced Canadian mining practises in Africa, in no uncertain terms, accompanied by all the documentation necessary to prove their case. According to Deneault’s most recent article, the world as it really is, with all its underlying ugliness, does not change nearly as quickly as do the false pretensions of many of the world’s leading liberal politicians. Who, I might add, claim to be quite progressive, while continuing to support environment-destroying, raw-material extractivism, which is particularly concentrated in all the world’s poorest countries.
He includes in his list of neoliberal aberrations the rise of the worldwide tourism industry, whose growth has been at least temporarily halted by the pandemic. According to him, middle-class tourism, just like all the other mass-based aberrations, should be allowed to disappear forever, even if that means that, once again, only rich people will be able to regularly visit foreign countries in the future, as was already the case prior to the 1980s. He hates the fact that all those manifestations of ultra-capitalism are in fact slated to re-appear, because the mass media are concentrating all their attention these days on how absolutely everything is supposed to be getting better soon, once the pandemic disappears (even in poor countries!), and the world situation gets back to what they call “normal”.
In my opinion, another major observation we should also be making in this context is the fact that this incredibly destructive pandemic started out in China, after all, and nowhere else. Even though it would be a mistake to believe in any of the fake news coming out of the ultra-right-wing rumour mills about the coronavirus being concocted in an official Chinese laboratory, the pandemic began, nevertheless, in one of that country’s quite numerous, open-air “labs”, namely the wild-animal meat markets. While it is true that many other East Asian countries also possess such markets, it is also true that China all by itself accounts for something like 80% of the entire East Asian population, as well as a similar proportion of those ultra-polluted markets. Which seem to have existed for centuries, and may very well have contributed to dozens of other Chinese-origin epidemics in the past, such as the Eurasian “Black Death” of the fourteenth century.
It was also the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government that decided that the pandemic officially began in December of 2019 (hence the acronym, COVID-19), rather than several months earlier as reported not only in China but also in Italy, to cover for the fact that it was the same PRC government that stalled around for several weeks before letting the rest of the world in on its big secret. Which gave Chinese travellers all the time they needed to spread the disease all over the world, most of them without even realizing what they were doing. According to all the most important liberal media, the Xi Jinping faction inside what those people still choose to call the Chinese Communist Party could have eliminated all the wild-animal meat-markets, like some of the leaders of the opposing factions wanted to do, but decided instead to keep them operating for national-populist reasons.
This is also the same PRC government that, once it finally decided to strongly react against the extremely dangerous nature of the disease in that imperial nation, pulled out all the stops and succeeded in imposing the kind of multi-million-people, total confinement strategy, the like of which most countries can only dream about. With the result that, at least according to the official government statistics, the pandemic killed only a very small group of people in China, in comparison with the much, much higher numbers of people who have died in many other parts of the world. And who will go on dying, in even greater numbers, unless by some miracle, the entire world population ends up getting properly vaccinated.
Several other East Asian countries, somewhat more democratic than the PRC, managed to avoid total disaster, at least in the beginning of the pandemic, because the people there cooperated fully with emergency government strategies set up to contain the disease. The most hard-hit countries in the world, however, were much more individualist countries like the USA, India, Brazil, the European nations, Canada/Québec, even (Eurasian) Russia, none of which, with the partial exception of Russia, are often seen as friends of China. The highest numbers officially recorded so far being posted in the USA, China’s main enemy. Even though the second SARS virus was created outdoors rather than in an official laboratory, how terribly convenient that the damn thing has nevertheless become for the ever-rising fortunes of the Chinese empire!
Still, none of this death and destruction seems to have been planned out in advance, at least not completely, in order to produce those spectacular results. There is, after all, plenty of evidence available in the real world that demonstrates that at least partial coincidences, even of that monstrous sort, do still take place quite often. Not everything that happens in this world comes about exclusively because of some official conspiracy, even though many of those conspiracies are quite real, and by no means all of them are fake.
The vast majority of the world’s natural scientists are convinced that the planet we all live in has entered into the Anthropocene era, in which the various different forms of pollution caused by human activity have come to have a major (almost entirely destructive) impact on the natural environment. Aside from all the other negative effects of this extraordinary phenomenon (such as climate change), ever-increasing, human-population expansion into areas once inhabited exclusively by wild animals has set off a series of recent pandemics, the long list of which includes the swine flu and two related, coronavirus pandemics. The first coronavirus pandemic apparently went away all by itself, back in 2004, while the second one has so far killed about two million people in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. The fact that the same WHO calculates that 12 million people are also slated to die in 2020 from environmental pollution, does not seem to have had much of an effect on the media. Nevertheless, it is true that ultra-individualist countries like the USA inevitably suffer a great deal more from the more persistent pandemics than do ultra-collectivist countries like China.
While it is true that the Trump movement is also a form of authoritarian neofascism, in its own way, it does not function in the same, much more collectivist fashion, as the authoritarian neofascism of the People’s Republic of China. The recently elected Georgia congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, from the ultra-idiotic Q-Anon faction inside the Trump organization, gave everyone a superb example of what Trump-ism is all about when she refused to wear an anti-virus mask in that august assembly.
Borrowing a slogan from the women’s liberation movement (that she nevertheless despises), she showed off her ultra-individualist attitude by exclaiming “my body, my choice”, by which she indicated that she did not want to participate, in any way whatsoever, in any of the USA’s traditional, constitutional rhetoric about upholding the “common good”, or, as they say in Massachusetts, the “Commonwealth”. From her point of view, the word “common” (as in the UK’s House of Commons) is merely the root idea inside the word “communism”. Even though she seems to belong to the social category known as “the common man” (or rather the common woman), since even though she is a business person, she does not seem to be excessively rich, she still refuses to admit that she could be just as common as anyone else. By rationally fearing death from the God-forsaken coronavirus, for example.
The “Trump nation’s” ultra-reactionary movement is similar in many ways to dozens of other countries under the joint influence of neoliberalism, neofascism and religious fundamentalism, on every continent, many of which, such as Hungary, Poland, Russia, Brazil, and so on, have also adopted local forms of atavistic Christianity. Which is in fact quite similar to the way that equally atavistic Hinduism in India has also been acting, as well as antediluvian Buddhism in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and ultra-right-wing Islam in an ever-increasing part of the Muslim world (Algeria, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and so on). Not to mention the neofascist role of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel (and several other countries).
Even the Chinese “communist” government has replaced its old-fashioned “Mao Zedong Thought” mantra with a revived adhesion to ancient, paternalist, religious feudalism, using its Confucius Institutes as the main thrust of its “united front” activities outside China. There is also another similar group in Japan trying to revive ultra-right-wing Shintoism as well. This is what “identity politics” in those countries is really all about. Even many of the extremely numerous indigenous peoples (“First Nations”), spread out all over the world, are also participating in this kind of thing, drawing on their own “animist” spirituality to make their own false claims. Such as for example, that each and every one of those peoples have always lived, since the dawn of creation, in exactly the same regions that they inhabit nowadays.
Getting back to the Muslim world, while it is true that fundamentalist Islam is only one of the world’s very numerous, very active, ultra-right-wing religious movements, it is also the one that is by far the most focused nowadays on killing off most of its enemies in the most spectacular, horrific ways possible. Organizations such as Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and Boko Haram routinely track down and behead as many “unbelievers” as possible, not only in every one of the Muslim-majority countries, or regions, but also in as many different “crusader states” as possible, succeeding in pulling off exceptionally spectacular attacks particularly in those European countries that possess a significant Muslim minority.
Whenever people in the Western world get more than a little upset by the disgusting activities of those Islamo-fascist organizations, however, professional liberal movements that concentrate their attention exclusively on individual rights and liberties, rather than on collective rights, accuse them of committing the sin of Islamophobia. From the liberal standpoint, collective rights, such as those of that official non-entity, the working-class, do not really exist except inside overheated, left-wing imaginations, because, as people sharing Margaret Thatcher’s interpretation of the world, they believe that there are no social classes, nor are there any other other sociological collectivities. Their world is made up entirely of individuals, and collections of individuals, such as those who choose to belong (one by one) to organized religions and political parties.
Ultra-individualist liberals, even if they belong to the national branches of worldwide organizations like Amnesty International, refuse to adopt a genuinely international approach to the world, and treat every event taking place in every country as if it happened in their own parochial backyards. Which means that they can be thrown off track very easily, as when some extreme-right-wing ideologues, such as Marine LePen in France’s National Rally political party, adroitly use laicity as a weapon against the influence of Islam in that country. The same thing also happens when similar reactionaries in Québec come out in support of the government’s “Bill 21”, which bans the wearing of religious insignia for civil servants in positions of authority. Individualist liberals use that tactical, temporary, ultra-right-wing support for (partial) laicity as an excuse for attacking any attempt at government neutrality toward religion, and accuse those governments of being just as ultra-conservative as the neofascist ideologues themselves.
In reality, the ultra-right-wing movements in the Western world are using the tactic of “identifying with laicity” for anti-Muslim propaganda purposes only, their long-term strategic goal being to do what such movements have always done, which is to support ultra-Christian forms of fundamentalism instead. Just like the Trump movement in the USA does, in a much more honest variety of pro-Christian neofascism. On the other hand, just about everyone in the USA knows that Trump supporters are in fact paternalist, white supremacists, even though they often pretend to be against racism and sexism in their official speeches. Supporting laicity would never occur to those antediluvians, such a stance being totally useless to their cause in a country like the USA.
It is only in places like France and Québec that any self-respecting neofascist would even think of pretending to support laicity, a point of view which tries to distance itself from all religious influence on the government by adopting a completely non-Christian, non-Muslim, non-any-other-religion approach. Only entirely dishonest, professional, liberal-individualist ideologues refuse to recognize that laicity as such has nothing whatever to do with ultra-conservative ideology. These liberal egoists nevertheless try to defend their erroneous point of view by accusing supporters of laicity as being in favour of systemic racism, since many of the people demonstrating against state-sponsored religious neutrality in Québec are Muslim women wearing the hijab, and various other kinds of cover-up clothing associated worldwide with Islamic fundamentalism.
Systemic racism, however, is a major problem all over the world, and not just in countries (France a lot more than Québec) that support official laicity. Countries adopting a “multicultural” promotion of religious plurality, such as the USA, Great Britain and English Canada, are every bit as much practitioners of systemic racism as are countries promoting laicity instead. Systemic racism is thoroughly entrenched in every society, on every continent, constituting a form of ultra-elitist class collaboration, just like systemic sexism also does, being constantly reinforced by not-so-invisible popular adhesion, by the ways in which constitutions are framed, by professional corporatism, by legal systems, by military systems enforcing imperialism, and by dozens of other, similar mechanisms. It cannot be erased merely by legislative tinkering, setting up liberal or social-democratic regulations that can easily be ignored by non-compliant bureaucracies, or by egotistical private citizens. Or rapidly overturned by more conservative governments, like the social-democratic nationalizations of major industries and services, in dozens of different countries, that have so often been overturned in the past.
Getting rid of systemic racism, and systemic sexism, both require much more profound social revolutions than anything that any of the world’s progressive political movements have so far been capable of effectuating. All the great political revolutions of the past, from the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, down through the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, the Latin American revolutions of the nineteenth century, the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century, as well as all the similar revolutions that also took place back then in Vietnam, Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba and dozens of other places, only managed to change the composition of the political groups in power. None of them managed to make any fundamental, long-lasting changes so far as systemic racism, or systemic sexism, are concerned. Nor did they succeed in doing away with the related, equally systemic, elitist, social-class divisions that have dominated every human society established on this planet since the neolithic revolution.
Which, among a thousand other consequences, also means that neither left-wing nor right-wing supporters of Québec independence, and of laicity, can legitimately claim that Québec’s “unique (historical) trajectory in the Americas” somehow proves that their country has never participated in systemic racism, not only towards Québec’s indigenous people, but also towards its own black population, or other such minorities. Not in the past, and not now. Just because Canadian federalism has been (ultra-hypocritically) denouncing systemic racism in Québec, as an ideological weapon in its imperialist assault on the Québec independence movement, does not exempt Québec from also having to embark on a much more serious assault on systemic racism, before and after having achieved its number one goal. The same thing also has to happen at some point in English Canada as well, whose phoney, fundamentalism-worshipping “multiculturalism” does not in any way exempt that country from also practising its own systemic racism in every part of its official territory.
Once again, systemic racism, and systemic sexism, are not the kinds of problems that can be solved by achieving national independence, nor by adopting laws aimed at reforming the way that police forces operate, nor by providing people looking for apartments to rent with anonymous résumés. The fight against systemic racism is a lot more difficult than that. As is the fight against systemic sexism, since half the people in both Canada, Québec and every other country in the world, are women (or girls), whether or not they belong to a dominant majority population or to a dominated minority population.
Nowadays, unfortunately, world politics as a whole is divided between the traditional, neoliberal, right-wing politicians, promoting private capitalism, and the upstart, neofascist, ultra-right-wing politicians, promoting state capitalism. In fact, it would be even more accurate to say that the vast majority of the world’s countries are run by pro-capitalist politicians using a combination of both neoliberalism and neofascism, promoting both private and state capitalism together. Ever since capitalism began, in the early-modern period of history (from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century), there never has been a country in the real world in which “private enterprise” managed to survive without some kind of government “intervention”. Nor has there ever been a country in the real world in which the government bureaucracy managed to run the economy without any kind of private sector contribution, not even in the USSR under Stalin, or the PRC under Mao. So the fact that some politicians favour private capitalism over state capitalism, and some prefer exactly the opposite, should not come as any sort of surprise.
The one thing that is truly new in world politics, since the 1970s, is the almost total disappearance of any large-scale left-wing movements. None of the huge communist parties that used to exist in days gone by have survived the complete extinction of the Soviet bloc, which disappeared partly from its own internal weaknesses, and partly from the USA’s highly successful flirtation with the so-called People’s Republic of China. A regime that has the audacity to pretend that its “red diaper baby” ruling class still really believes (super-long-term), in the communist cause. At the same time, all the world’s equally huge democratic-socialist parties from the same 1970s all caved in to neoliberalism during the 1980s, managing to remain pertinent by entering into formal, or tacit, coalitions with traditional conservative parties like the Christian Democratic Union in Germany. As a result, most of today’s “leftists” have all become fringe gad-flies, focused on cancel culture, toppling statues of official heroes from the past. Nothing terribly threatening to the people who are still very much in power.
Liberal-minded politicians opposed to the neofascist antics of enraged dough-heads like Donald Trump therefore find it quite easy to ignore the left most of the time, because there is nothing much left to ignore. Without, of course, acknowledging that all the neofascist autocrats in this world share with them their own deeply ingrained neoliberal tendencies. Neoliberalism therefore becoming the antechamber of neofascism, in spite of all the horrified disclaimers proclaimed by establishment liberals like the Clintons, Obama, Biden and Harris (in the USA), as well as quite similar politicians like Justin Trudeau in Canada, Dominique Anglade in Québec and Emmanuel Macron in France.
A reality that has prompted some really young political philosophers to go so far as to reject rationality and science as being inherently anti-humanist, because they have recently “discovered” that modern “economic science” is synonymous with neoliberalism, having replaced exchange-value, focused on material considerations, for “spiritual” use-value. It is as if these people have convinced themselves to truly believe that no anti-capitalist economists (such as Karl Marx, for example) have ever existed. But why would any intelligent person, in his or her right mind, want to decide that the fact that liberal economists have unscientifically chosen to incorporate the capitalist (“free enterprise”) point of view into their ultra-reductionist frames of reference, should make spiritual philosophers reject everything scientific as being necessarily anti-human?
All the observations listed above, about the extraordinary weakness of the left-wing movements in the Western countries, and in the formerly totalitarian “communist” countries, also apply to most of the equally leftist, national liberation movements, of the former “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America). In South Africa, for example, the ANC government that overthrew the former apartheid regime during the early 1990s, merely replaced the Boer colonialists of European origin with a small group of black millionaires, leaving the vast majority of the population suffering from the same kind of extreme poverty that had already existed under the previous regime. African immigrants from neighbouring, even poorer countries, such as Mozambique, are also being treated in a racist manner by their “black brothers” in South Africa. Thereby totally ignoring the ridiculous claims of gad-fly leftists in the Western world that only white people can possibly be racist.
Left-liberal attacks on universalism as being inherently racist, because only Westerners promote universalism, are also way off-base, given the equally universal pretensions of Islamic fanaticism. It is also extremely important in this context to denounce the highly dangerous complacency of people like Chris Harman, the former leader (now deceased) of one of the UK’s Trotskyist parties, who thought that it was a good idea for leftists like himself to become occasional “fellow travellers” with ultra-right-wing, non-governmental, Islamic extremists, while always refusing to collaborate with anyone holding state power.
Harman somehow managed to convince himself that such totally dedicated reactionaries would eventually come round to identifying with the lower classes just by virtue of being opposed to Western imperialism. (See the article written by Jean Birnbaum, “La gauche et l’islamisme, retour sur un péché d’orgueil”, “The left and Islamism, return to a sin of pride”, published in “Le Monde”, November 26, 2020.) This is not quite as dumb an idea as pretending that the 1939-1941 Hitler-Stalin pact was really an anti-imperialist alliance, but it comes pretty close. It is hard to believe that this is the same Chris Harman who came out so strongly in favour of the European Enlightenment in his 1999 book, “The People’s History of the World”.
In addition to all the different kinds of religious fundamentalism, extremely well-entrenched in dozens of third-world countries, many of those same places are also suffering from equally deep-rooted corruption affecting not only proudly right-wing regimes but also many officially left-wing organizations. (To be sure, that observation applies just as much to all the ruling elites in all the world’s richest countries as well.) In Colombia and Mexico, for example, the enormous cartels trafficking illegal drugs such as cocaine into North American markets have tremendous influence not only over traditional, right-wing governments but also over many of their theoretically left-wing opponents, such as the formerly popular FARC insurgency in Colombia or the current PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) in Mexico. The number of examples of this kind of corruption extends to practically every former national-liberation movement, all over the world, even in countries still fighting for their independence, such as the official, Fatah-led government of the Palestinian Authority, and the rival, Islamic-fundamentalist, Palestinian movement, known as Hamas.
In my opinion, nothing undermines support for left-wing organizations, movements and governments throughout the world as much as when they are, or at least appear to be, just as much involved in highly profitable, private-capitalist and state-capitalist, corruption as the more traditional, right-wing organizations, movements and governments. This same observation also applies to similar movements and organizations currently existing in many of the indigenous minorities in countries like Canada, Russia, Australia and Brazil. Whenever large-scale corruption and drug-trafficking also afflict those minority communities in a big way, it makes popular support for those movements, both from within their own communities and from the majority (non-indigenous) populations that surround them, much more difficult to develop.
In this context, it bears repeating that imperialism, colonialism and extractivism are not at all confined only to the Western varieties, such as US imperialism and European imperialism, or junior-partner varieties like Canadian, Australian and Israeli imperialism. The same reactionary ideologies are also quite well-developed in countries like China and Russia, as well in less powerful forms of regional imperialism in Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Brazil and several other places. Racism is also equally well-developed in the above list of countries, as well as everywhere else in the world, as are militarism and ethnic exclusivism. It is genuinely racist to claim that all these reactionary ideologies are not in fact universal. Why would they not be? Human beings are the same the world over. Whenever a country gets strong enough to provide it with an opportunity to exploit other countries, that opportunity is always taken.
At the present time, unfortunately, the pandemic is by no means going away, it is only just getting started. Failing to vaccinate the majority of the world’s population, either because the rich countries are using up all the available vaccines, or because millions of ultra-individualists are refusing to get vaccinated, only means that herd immunity may never be attained. Which also means that older strains, or newer ones, of the same disease may quite easily re-infect the world during multiple, future waves. At the same time, the enormous economic and social disruptions stemming from the pandemic have thoroughly worsened the already disastrous problems of extreme social divisions, environmental destruction and every other, potentially future-erasing, catastrophes that have been building up since the joint neoliberal/neofascist counter-revolution began back in the 1970s.
The return to work for at least several million of all the people who lost their jobs during the pandemic seems to have been compromised forever, as does the retirement pay of millions of other people as well. The pandemic has also become a complete and total setback for women’s rights all over the world, compromising the education of millions more young girls than before, as well as the removal of the partial protection from harm that school provided many of them in the past. Women’s job losses are also much higher than men’s job losses, their income reductions are much greater, domestic violence has increased everywhere even more than it was before, as have such anti-feminine, “barbarian cultural practises” as excision and “honour” killings, to say nothing of the much more difficult access to abortions.
Other groups of vulnerable people of both sexes, such as old people, “racialized” minorities and recent immigrants, are also suffering even more than before. There has also been an enormous setback for international aid programs, the possibility of wars breaking out all over the place has gone way up, as have the number of slaves enduring forced labour, infanticide has much increased (especially against baby girls), palliative care is also much more difficult to access. Progressive trends such as the increased use of mass transit in many countries have also nose-dived as a result of the pandemic.
As poet Edward Fitzgerald put it back in the nineteenth century, in his very British translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” In other words, folks, it is going to be impossible to bring back “the good old days” from before the pandemic. Especially since those days were not nearly so good for the immense majority of the world’s people as they were for the tiny minority of people of privilege.
