The zombie market promotes civil war
As part of my ongoing investigation into the nature of the contemporary world’s most reactionary, and most influential ideologies, all of them closely intertwined, I recently read several more books that provided me with a great deal of new information. One of those books, that came out just a few months ago, was written by four French intellectuals, Pierre Dardot, Haud Guégen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre, under the title “Le choix de la guerre civile: Une autre histoire du néolibéralisme” (“Choosing civil war: A different history of neoliberalism”). Those authors focused their analysis on the methods used by neoliberal ideologues, over the past several decades, in particular the promotion of more or less legal forms of civil war, in what turned out to be a highly successful attempt to thoroughly control the thought processes, and behaviour, of the most important movers and shakers of the contemporary world.
According to those four authors, the intellectual founders of neoliberalism began writing hundreds of books and articles during the period from the 1920s through to the 1970s, developing a strategy in favour of converting, or re-converting, the entire world to the school of economic liberalism that had been adopted quite deliberately in Great Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, as a strategy for world domination back in the nineteenth century. Those ideologues, the most well-known of whom were people like Walter Lippmann, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, did not have very much influence over the real world when they first started writing. The reason being that the leaders of the world’s richest countries during the early part of the twentieth century, some of whom did not really like British domination all that much, had come to adopt an opposing point of view instead, accepting a significant degree of government “intervention” into economic and social policy. By that time, even the majority of the British leaders were also moving in the same direction.
It was only much later, when Margaret Thatcher, the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, after having adopted von Hayek’s ideas as the basis of her electoral program, succeeded in getting herself elected to the prime minister’s office, from 1979 until 1990, that the game was on. Other similarly inclined politicians, especially Ronald Reagan in the USA and Helmut Kohl in the German Federal Republic, both of whose nations had long since overtaken the British lead in industrialization, rapidly followed suit by also adopting those same, strictly private-capitalist, ultra-elitist ideas. The three of them then helped promote the subsequent wave of adhesion to neoliberalism involving most of the world’s richest and most powerful people, as well as millions of their ordinary followers, including a significant number of formerly left-wing opponents of vulture capitalism.
Although I was impressed with much of what those four French authors accomplished in their systematic analysis of the roots of neoliberalism, I was nevertheless disappointed by their limited geographical focus on the world’s richest countries, the USA and Western Europe, the only poorer countries included in their analysis being Chile and Brazil. Which means that they did not have much to say about the rise of neoliberalism in dozens of other countries, the most important of which was the People’s Republic of China, under Deng Xiao-ping, who had also completed his own conversion to neoliberalism in 1979, only three years after the deaths of China’s former leaders, Mao Ze-dong and Zhou En-lai. Which does not mean that the extreme form of state capitalism being promoted by those leaders, similar to but not exactly the same as the Soviet Union’s variety of state capitalism, was any better.
Even though those four French intellectuals obviously consider neoliberalism to be a very destructive ideology, they also had very little to say about how people who agree with them about that particular mindset ought to go about fighting against its influence. I will return to a more detailed analysis of their book later on in this blogpost, but I want to introduce right at the outset some of the other works that I also read recently. Each one of these sources has also provided me with new information about the other reactionary ideologies that dominate the contemporary world alongside neoliberalism, each one of them contributing to the terrible mess that we have gotten ourselves into nowadays. Each such ideology constantly intersects with each other one, and reinforces each other’s negative effects on our unusually beleaguered, contemporary world. Aside from neoliberalism, itself an offshoot of class-based elitism, those other ideologies include extractivism, imperialism, militarism, ethnic exclusivism, religious fanaticism, racism, sexism and age-ism, all of which constantly combine their effects to create different varieties of neofascism all over the world.
The second book that I want to talk about in this context is French journalist Hervé Kempf’s intelligent little work, “Tout est prêt pour que tout empire: 12 leçons pour éviter la catastrophe” (“Everything is ready to get a lot worse: 12 ways of avoiding catastrophe”), published in 2017. I read this book several months before the one about neoliberalism, and I was impressed by its much more comprehensive scope. I had already expressed in many previous blogposts published since 2013 the idea of taking on the entire list of the recently revived, ultra-right-wing ideologies that I found to be so mutually reinforcing in today’s world.
But Kempf turned out to be the first author that I consulted who believes that at least three of those ideologies, extractivism (the underlying cause of the ecology crisis), neoliberalism (that Kempf detests as much as the authors of the 2021 book do), and the religious terrorism of the Islamist movement, also interact to make each other ideology much worse, and much more dangerous, than if each one of them was acting alone. For Kempf, however, the already very real ecological threat is by far the most important of those issues, neoliberalism and terrorism, besides being thoroughly reactionary ideologies in and of themselves, also making it much more difficult to do anything about stopping the oncoming environmental catastrophe.
Kempf’s work, however, also fell victim to a fundamental flaw, which was his vehement rejection of what he called “dogmatic atheism” (page 98) and his support for the Catholic Church, particularly the faction centred around the Argentinian Jesuit, Jorge Mario Bargoglio, who became Pope Francis in 2013. Kempf also adopted (page 11) the thoroughly inadequate ideas of the philosopher Hans Jonas, who wrote a book back in 1979 about what he called the “responsibility principle”, in which he deplored the “excessive dimensions of the scientific-technical-industrial civilization”, calling on the developed countries of capitalism to “forego prosperity for the benefit of the rest of the world”. Kempf returned to Jonas again (page 64), linking the “end of progress” movement to his ideas, as well as on page 98, in this case citing Jonas in favour of the rise of a new mass religious movement to stop the hedonism of material abundance in its tracks. Kempf seems to believe that Pope Francis adheres to the same ideas that Jonas was promoting.
The problem with the Jonas approach is that it equates capitalism and hedonism with science and atheism, as if it were not the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists who have been sounding the alarm bells for the past several decades in favour of saving the natural environment from total destruction. And as if some new religious movement could actually succeed in moving the world in the opposite direction, away from the fixation on short-term profit maximization.
How can Kempf support Jonas on this point nowadays, given the fact that neoliberalism is being promoted to the hilt by evangelical Christianity in many different parts of North America, Latin America and Africa? And the fact that Muslim fanatics are vigorously promoting the sale of ever-increasing quantities of petroleum and natural gas by all the countries (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, etc.) from which they receive most of their funding (page 16)? And the fact that Hindu fanaticism in India is also combining quite readily with full-blown neoliberalism (page 77)? Does Kempf really believe that most of the Catholic Church supports Jonas’ ideas as much as he does, in all-out opposition to the neoliberal, evangelical-Christian point of view? In any case, he certainly does not seem to know much about the atheist movement (a large part of which refers to itself as the humanist movement), if he does not realize how much those people also support the ecology movement, and have been doing so for a very long time.
After returning to the Dardot-Guégen-Laval-Sauvêtre work, later on in this blogpost, I will also be revisiting the Kempf book as well, but for the moment I want to introduce the other sources that I read recently, more books as well as several newsmagazine articles, each one of them contributing to my overall reflections on the intertwining of each of the world’s most objectionable ideologies. A third book that I read more recently than the Kempf book, even though it was published nine years earlier, turned out to be even more prescient than Kempf’s contribution. Its author was Gwynne Dyer, a very prolific Canadian journalist who usually writes about recent geopolitical confrontations, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2008, however, he wrote a rather different kind of book, called “Climate Wars”, about the geopolitics of climate change, that he then updated to include the results of the extremely disappointing 2009 Copenhagen conference, in the second edition. As Dyer pointed out, the anticipated results of that worldwide assembly were largely sabotaged by the dispute between older industrial nations like the USA, and newer industrial nations like China, over which group of countries was the most responsible back then for the huge increase in toxic emissions of all kinds coming from the constant burning of fossil fuels, in every part of the world, that is still accelerating nowadays.
Dyer, however, also directly linked climate change with geopolitics in his analysis, especially in his five “scenario” chapters predicting a series of future events that he considered to be plausible back in 2009: in the order that he presented them, “Russia, 2019”, “United States, 2029”, “Northern India, 2036”, “Canada, 2055” and “China, 2042”. In those chapters, interspersed with all his other chapters offering a more traditional analysis of climate politics up to 2008-2009, he predicted that over time the all-too-real effects of climate change on future governments would inevitably result in extreme over-reaction on their part. For example, the failure of crops all over the world would not just lead to death from starvation in each one of the affected regions, it would also lead to events as dire as nuclear war (between India and Pakistan, for example), once the most populated countries, in particular, realized that they could no longer feed their enormous populations.
Some of his predictions seem more than a little bit far-fetched, but what is important to point out here is that Dyer had already anticipated in quite a lot of detail the fact that in the real world, something as drastic as full-fledged climate change would not just result in mega-death from massive crop failure. It would also lead governments and private corporations, not to mention millions of private individuals, to become much more neofascist than many of them have already become nowadays. In the real world, more people would probably be wiped out as a result of the over-reactions of their leaders to advanced climate change than would be eliminated in the extremely unlikely event of everyone deciding to just sit around passively, and die of hunger all alone, one “rugged individualist” at a time.
Even though Dyer himself made no attempt to directly connect climate change with neoliberalism as such, nor to most of the other reactionary ideologies that I just mentioned, including the concept of neofascism, much of what he had to say still seems to me to be highly pertinent to that discussion anyway. A large part of his book was devoted to analyzing how every major human weakness (such as extremely destructive geopolitical conflict and uncontrolled pollution of the natural environment) always intersects and worsens every other major issue.
All of which does not mean that I agree with some of Dyer’s more recent opinions, that I read about on the Internet, such as his attempt to downplay the importance of the return to power of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, that he somehow dismisses as “not really” a victory for Islamic terrorism. In my view, the rise of ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) forms of religious fanaticism, currently affecting all the world’s religions and not just the Muslim one, are part and parcel of everything that is going wrong nowadays. It is just another form of ultra-irrational ideology that intersects with neoliberalism and its accompanying focus on the ongoing removal of ever-larger quantities of raw materials from nature (extractivism), to make today’s world an increasingly dangerous place in which to live.
A fourth book that I also read recently, right after those first three, was “Monsters of the Market: Zombies, vampires and global capitalism”, published in 2011. This was a highly unusual analysis of how the rise of global capitalism over the past few centuries has intersected with tales of zombies and vampires encountered in folklore and popular culture, in early-modern England, as well as in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Its author, David McNally, a professor of political science at York University in Toronto, also succeeded quite well in connecting those tales with Karl Marx’s “persistent use of monster metaphors in his description of capitalism.” In spite of its larger historical scope, it was nevertheless written from a contemporary perspective, using more than a few references to the “zombie market” of neoliberalism, and therefore turned out to be much more relevant to my own project than I originally assumed that it would, when I started reading it. More on that book, also later.
My fifth recent reading was a book by the well-known French expert, Yves Lacoste, who wrote an overview of contemporary geopolitics, published back in 2006, entitled “Géopolitique: La longue histoire d’aujourd’hui” (“Geopolitics: The long history of today”). The last fifteen years of enormous changes in the world geopolitical configuration have caused some of his analysis to become rather outdated right now, such as his emphasis on the total domination of the entire world back then by the victor in the Cold War, the USA. Nevertheless, much of what he had to say about several other issues, such as politicized (ultra-right-wing) Islam, that I consider to be a non-Western form of neofascism, is still quite pertinent nowadays. Particularly his emphasis on the fact that even though Islamism is obviously reacting to recent Soviet, Western and Israeli military attacks on more than a few Muslim countries, the strictly religious motivation for the rise of that antediluvian movement is even more important than those extremely violent, non-Muslim, provocations.
A sixth book that I read recently was not directly related to my focus on current events but nevertheless added an even more unusual take on the historical origins of capitalism, also, thankfully, from a contemporary perspective. This one was written by Jacques Attali, a very well-known civil servant and former adviser to French president François Mitterrand, and it is a laudatory account, first published in 2002, of the influence of Jewish culture on what he rather euphemistically called “capitalist ethics” over the ages. Its title was “Les juifs, le monde et l’argent: Histoire économique du peuple juif” (“Jews, the world and money: An economic history of the Jewish people”). The chapter that I found the most useful, obviously enough, was the most recent one, about the period after 1945. I will also return to a longer presentation of some of the ideas offered in Attali’s book, later on in this blogpost.
Several other sources that I read last summer were only incidentally pertinent to my overall investigation, such as two works by the recently deceased Québec anthropologist Serge Bouchard, “C’était au temps des mammouths laineux” (“Back in the days of woolly mammoths”), published in 2013, and “Un café avec Marie” (“A coffee with Marie”), published in 2021. I only want to make reference to those largely autobiographical books in this context because I disagree with Bouchard, first of all, about the inherently “rational” nature of capitalism (page 184 in the first book and page 135 in the second book.) There is nothing rational about the kind of capitalism (neoliberalism) that has not only dominated this planet for the past forty years but also constantly ignores any attempt at getting serious about the ever-increasing degradation of the natural environment.
My second disagreement with Bouchard’s ideas is that on several different occasions in both books, he promoted the erroneous idea that most traditional indigenous economies are now and always have been ecologically-friendly. This is quite a common mistake among many progressive, non-indigenous people, in Canada, in Québec and in many other countries, who are quite rightly furious at the horrible way in which European colonizers (but not only the European ones) have treated indigenous peoples all over the world. Then they notice that many of the indigenous people that they meet, or that they have heard about, in particular those living in regions slated for “resource development”, turn out to be strong “land defenders”, doing their best to protect the areas that they live in from being laid waste by huge extractive industries.
In my opinion, those progressive-minded, non-indigenous people often overlook the fact that many other indigenous people just as often support such extractive development, for the same economic reasons that many non-indigenous people do. Unfortunately, the idea of considering all, or most, indigenous people to be necessarily ecologically-friendly means that people like Bouchard are practising a kind of upside-down form of prejudice, in which indigenous people somehow become superior to non-indigenous people, as a whole, rather than inferior to them. In reality, indigenous peoples all over the world are neither superior nor inferior to non-indigenous peoples, but quite similar instead, exhibiting the same sorts of contradictions as everyone else.
Another incidental source that I consulted last summer was the special edition of the French newsmagazine known since 2003 as “La Revue pour l’intelligence du monde”, based in France but run until his recent death by Béchir Ben Yahmed (“BBY”), a well-known journalist of Tunisian origin who also founded the pan-africanist periodical, “Jeune Afrique”, back in 1960. His most remarkable editorials for “La Revue” were reprinted in the July-August 2021 edition, including one editorial, “Demain, l’apocalypse” (“Tomorrow, the apocalypse”) from May 2007, in which he explained quite well why nuclear weapons are still extremely dangerous nowadays, as well as being another excellent example of the extremely unequal, neocolonial nature of the contemporary world. That same text starts out, however, with BBY claiming that we no longer have to worry about over-population anywhere, because of recent changes in human demography, and that we now have the capacity to feed everyone in the world reasonably well, both of them being claims that I do not agree with at all.
Finally, I also want to include one of the most recent “Grands dossiers” of the French magazine called “Sciences humaines”, published in the summer of this year, about “La grande histoire du féminisme”. I agree with most of the articles published in that issue of the magazine, the only exception being the misguided attempt of one of their contributors, Florence Rochefort, to also present a feminist rationale (page 61), as well as an exclusively religious explanation, for the wearing of the Islamic scarf. In my view, the women wearing cover-up clothing in the Islamist movement are not promoting any kind of feminism whatsoever, but are rather kowtowing to a fanatical, religious form of male chauvinism, in what can only be described as a kind of voluntary slavery. Not my idea of what women’s liberation is supposed to be all about. I also read a newspaper report about a book recently published in 2021 by Éric Maurin, the director of France’s most prestigious school of social science, that presented the findings of his own research into how the banning of religious scarves by Muslim girls and women in public places in France several years ago has led to a significant increase in their marks at school.
I want to add several additional comments to some of those works later on in my text, those that are the most pertinent to my overall investigation, starting right now with a more detailed examination of the 2021 book on neoliberalism. This book was mostly about the early history of the neoliberal ideology, from the 1930s through to the 1970s, towards the end of the hundred-year period (1880 to 1980) during which the world’s dominant economies gradually distanced themselves somewhat from classical economic liberalism’s prior emphasis on laissez-faire. The twentieth-century founders of neoliberalism, people like Walter Lippmann, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, detested the entire illiberal trend in which they found themselves back then.
Which, from their point of view, was based on what they considered to be “overly democratic” attempts by governments from that earlier period to abandon total market control of the economy in favour of such “irrational heresies” as infant-industry protectionism in emerging economies, the minimum wage, the welfare state, the promotion of union organizing and the progressive income tax. What those neoliberal ideologues wanted to preserve the most from the “misguided” perils of democracy was what one of their number, Louis Rogier, in books published in 1929 and again in 1938, referred to as “that marvellous calculating machine that is the mechanism of price, automatically solving the system of equations on which economic equilibrium depends” (cited on page 69 in the 2021 book).
During the 1980s, the overwhelming influence of those right-wing intellectuals on such leading politicians as Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl, rapidly succeeded in reversing the previously “excessive” democratic tendencies of the 1880-1980 period altogether, and put almost the entire world back under the control of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (the so-called “free market”). Those politicians’ whole idea, that they borrowed from neoliberalism’s ideological founders, was based on the premise that the market should not be held back by any moral considerations whatsoever (page 65), such as anti-elitist support for heresies like full employment. As Ludwig von Mises phrased it, they believed that civilization itself was entirely based on the private property of the means of production (page 95). The only freedoms that they thought should be recognized in a neoliberal world being the freedom to invest and the freedom to consume (page 18). They considered any opposing points of view to form part of the socialist perspective, whose adoption would put an end to everything that civilized people like them held dear.
Although the authors of the 2021 book did not make more than a passing reference to this point, I think that the rapid transition from the somewhat anti-liberal trend of the previous period, and the anticipated return to full-blown economic liberalism that characterized the forty years between 1979 and 2019, also benefited greatly from the central bankers’ monetarist war on inflation. A crusade that imposed extremely high interest rates on most of the world economy from 1979 to 1989, thereby deliberately causing a major worldwide recession in the process. Something that the monetarists considered to be much less damaging to elitist civilization than “runaway inflation”, because it caused far more problems for major investors’ rate of profit than it did for working class wages.
As I mentioned earlier, those four French authors made very few references in their work to countries coming from what used to be called the “second world” (the Soviet bloc), nor even to the much larger “third world” (poor, neocolonial states), with the exception of Chile and Brazil. They chose instead to focus their attention almost exclusively on what was happening inside the “first world” (the richest countries of the Western world, and Japan). Personally, I do not think that neoliberalism would have triumphed nearly as easily as it did if the Eastern bloc (the USSR and its nominally “communist” allies), during the same general period of time, had not fallen apart completely and returned to promoting private capitalism once again, as opposed to those same countries’ previous emphasis on all-out support for state capitalism.
Not to forget that both the decline and fall of the Soviet bloc, as well as the worldwide triumph of neoliberalism, were also made possible by the victory of the “capitalist road” faction inside the “Communist” Party of China, as well as in the handful of other countries (Vietnam, Laos, Cuba), still officially calling themselves communist right up to the present day. Even North Korea has accepted neoliberalism indirectly, through its total dependence on Chinese economic and political support. Chinese leader Deng Xiao-ping, who ran that country from 1978 to at least 1989, if not until his death in 1997, became every bit as important as Thatcher, Reagan or Kohl in making sure that the neoliberal counter-revolution became truly worldwide.
In my opinion, China’s current role as the new “workshop of the world” is directly related to its “market-Leninist” adoption of neoliberalism, starting in 1979. (The reference to “market-Leninism” replacing “Marxism-Leninism” in the PRC comes from Dany-Robert Dufour’s 2007 book on “The divine market”, to which I dedicated a previous blogpost.) The process by which the USA, Western Europe and Japan, as well as the Russian Federation and parts of Eastern Europe, gave up a very large part of their industrial production to several emerging countries, especially to the ultra-low-wage “People’s Republic” of China, has contributed enormously to the rise of neofascist sentiment in all those countries. Not to mention also promoting related kinds of neofascist sentiment inside China itself, centring on the revival of the top-down, feudal philosophies of classical Chinese authors, particularly Confucius.
Another major weakness in those four authors’ history of neoliberalism has to do with the ongoing destruction of the natural environment, which is not very often mentioned in their book. It seems to me that it is also highly pertinent to underline the fact that the contemporary world seems to be unable to change course completely, by seeking some kind of alternative goal for the global economy than neoliberalism’s obsessive-compulsive fixation on short-term profit maximization. With the result that the very poorly-treated natural world will no longer be able to sustain a population of almost eight billion people, let alone the ten billion being projected for the immediate future. Especially when at least three-quarters of all those people are already on the verge of starvation, as well as suffering from every other possible kind of economic and social deprivation.
The kind of climate change that Dyer and Kempf were focusing on in their books is only the most important and the most dangerous effect of today’s massive output of all the multiple varieties of industrial and agricultural pollution, not to mention pollution from human sewage. There is no other way out of the horrendous ecological crisis than to repudiate short-term profit maximization altogether, once and for all. Most of the recent scientific discoveries leading to such revolutionary technologies as the personal computer and the Internet seem almost entirely confined to the communications industry, whose most important, negative utilization seems to be in enormously increasing elitist capacities at controlling ordinary people’s thought and behaviour patterns.
Potential discoveries of an entirely different nature include the successful harnessing of immensely less polluting fusion power to replace fossil fuels, which offers the promise of creating enormous new supplies of energy by relying on totally different natural resources, namely an abundant supply of the most common isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium), naturally occurring especially in seawater. The promise of discovering a successful technique for producing fusion power, however, seems as far off nowadays as it did fifty years ago. I completely agree with Kempf that today’s total focus on short-term resource extraction should be replaced by a circulatory world economy instead, based on the constant recycling of every possible kind of input. We should certainly not be relying exclusively on technological change, which is incapable of making that enormous change all by itself, but as Kempf himself pointed out, the right kinds of technological change could also help out significantly (page 82).
It seems to me, however, that neither of those complementary strategies can possibly be put into place in the time remaining for us to do something necessarily drastic. Ecologists all over the world have been telling us that we only have ten years left to do something, before it is too late, for at least the past ten years! In other words, there is not enough time left. It seems to me now that we should have implemented both of those strategies, particularly the circulatory economy, back in the 1970s, immediately after the publication of the 1972 “Limits to growth” report. However, I did not think that way back then, because I thought that the limited-growth idea would only be used against poor people, an idea that has, after all, been largely borne out by the ever-increasing polarization of the entire world between a very few ultra-rich people and a very large number of ultra-poor people. The fact that almost the entire world adopted neoliberalism instead, from 1979 to 2019, and that most countries are still fixated on neoliberal ways of doing things even now, means that we lost the minimum amount of time necessary, about forty years in fact, that we needed in order to build up a circulatory economy almost from scratch.
At the same time, however, I see no indication whatsoever in today’s world that any of the most important private capitalists currently living have the slightest intention of abandoning their particularly exaggerated form of economic egoism. This remains true in spite of all the efforts currently being made by more traditional politicians, such as Joe Biden, to spend a lot more public money on infrastructure, as well as on each country’s respective health and education systems, than the ultra-conservative politicians, from Margaret Thatcher on down to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, were (and still are) proposing. Which, in spite of all the caveats about promoting prosperity through public investment, are bound to fail without the support of the huge, largely-alienated populations living inside the previously industrialized regions (the “Rust Belts”) of all the nations affected by the enormous transfer of industrial jobs that took place during the 1980s.
Private-sector participation in the pandemic-induced reconstruction effort undertaken very recently by Biden and his friends is also sadly lacking, as can be surmised from the continuing popularity of neoliberal attitudes in dozens of different sectors of the economy. Such as the horribly inflationary state of the housing market, which is forcing millions of ordinary people, even in the world’s richest countries, to forego any hope of ever owning a home. They are therefore being obliged to pay a much larger sum of money than ever before to slum landlords, just like most of the world’s people have always done in the very numerous, much poorer countries. The reconstruction effort is also being undermined by the enormous increase in public debt to private banks, given the forty-year neoliberal emphasis on constantly reducing tax rates for ultra-rich people. Which in spite of recent, rather feeble, attempts to increase government income slightly from all the world’s millionaires and billionaires, are nowhere near the levels that they reached in many countries, such as the USA, during the “thirty glorious years” from 1945 to 1975.
Neoliberalism is also being reinforced by the still-continuing adoption of reactionary labour laws in many countries all over the world, such as Québec’s “Law 59”, designed not to increase but to severely reduce health and safety protection on the job, both in the private and the public sectors. The very poorly-timed effects of most of the world’s continued adhesion to neoliberalism also include the invention of totally new ways of making obscene gobs of money, such as planned obsolescence, the taking over of a highly significant portion of the world’s electrical grid to produce totally speculative bitcoins, and the excessively weird idea of non-fungible assets (deliberately immaterial but immensely expensive “artwork”).
Nevertheless, all the references I have so far made to the weaknesses of the book written by Dardot, Guégen, Laval and Sauvêtre, should not be taken as a dismissal of their extremely important contributions to the history of neoliberalism. They succeeded very well indeed in describing the essence of the ideas developed by that group of neoliberal pioneers (Lippmann, Mises, Hayek, et al). One of their most important contributions being their demonstration of the way in which those pioneers accomplished their self-designated assignment, not as expected by attempting to restore the laissez-faire orientation that was originally set up in Great Britain during the industrial revolution of 1780-1880, but by convincing all the world’s pro-capitalist governments to adopt some variety or other of “authoritarian liberalism” instead.
This meant (paradoxically) installing strong state intervention aimed at “de-politicizing” the economy altogether, by guaranteeing such “golden-rule” forms of economic orthodoxy as monetary stability, balanced budgets, the decoupling of the central banks from any form of political control and unrestrained competition for market control among private investors (pages 45 and 101). In other words, turning on its head the kind of “government intervention” into the economy that was more popular in the 1880-1980 period, by making sure that everything that government did should henceforth and from now on be designed not to control what used to be called the “excesses” of capitalism, as in the previous, more illiberal period, but to promote those very same excesses instead. Exactly the same idea that contemporary neoliberal, and simultaneously neofascist, politicians, such as US Trump-Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been recently promoting, she in her own inimitable way (“Save America, Stop Socialism”) (page 196).
The second, equally important contribution of those four authors has been their focus on the very well-developed political strategy, invented by the founders of neoliberalism and then adopted by all the government leaders who supported that ideology, including most of the leaders of what used to be called democratic socialism in Western Europe (page 14). Which was to actively promote more or less legalized forms of civil war between opposing sections of each country’s population, as took place recently in Chile, Brazil, the USA and many European countries (through the reactionary policies of political chieftains like Sebastian Pinera, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Victor Orban, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and so on), pitting ultra-right-wing populist factions against the traditional right-wing of formal democracy (politicians like the USA’s Joe Biden and France’s Emmanuel Macron).
The formerly pro-communist and social-democratic politicians in those countries, as well as in many other countries, cynically abandoned the industrial working-class in the “Rust Belt” regions of all those nations, in favour of neoliberalism and the adoption of a “new constituency” focused on recent immigrants coming into their metropolitan regions. Which led to a large section of the hugely under-employed, often “white trash” populations in the formerly industrialized regions then being successfully manipulated into supporting ultra-right-wing, neofascist formations instead. With the result that people like Biden and Macron are currently (and erroneously) considered to be “left-wing” politicians, in comparison with their neofascist opponents, overlooking all the contributions that they themselves made to neoliberalism prior to the current outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. And that most of them are still making by insisting on currying “bipartisan” favour with the still immensely strong, ultra-orthodox, authoritarian-liberal faction.
In the past several decades, the supporters of neoliberalism accomplished their incredibly reactionary take-over through the auto-alienation (page 229) of large sections of the entire population, using right-wing populism to divide people into opposing factions, the traditional “divide and conquer” strategy of all prior ruling classes being further refined by the addition of several new smoke and mirror games aimed at concealing what is really going on even more so than in the past (page 304). Millions of people have been induced to practise the Hobbesian “war of each against all” inside every possible kind of workplace (page 214), turning the popular masses against themselves (page 72), promoting the total identification of employees with their employers, internalizing management injunctions by inducing people to become “self-entrepreneurs” (Gary Becker) and generally practising various different kinds of “voluntary slavery” toward the prevailing economic system (pages 222-229).
Still another major contribution that those authors made to the history of neoliberalism was to underline the emphasis that the founders of that ideology also made on helping their ultra-individualist cause (for rich people only) by reviving old-fashioned forms of social control in every affected country. Based in particular on the proposed return of the traditional, male-dominated family, the revival of old-time religion (evangelical Christianity) and the return of individualist definitions of freedom that characterize ultra-right-wing cultural values (pages 191-195). Those traditional values include the freedom to be racist, the freedom to be sexist, and the freedom to make as much money as one can, whatever the consequences, according to the precepts of “liberation theology” in Latin America (page 203) and the Pentecostal slogan, “God helps those who help themselves” that was also popularized in the USA.
In other words, to be as generally “anti-progressive” as any ultra-right-wing populist could possibly be. Including, of course, promoting the right to hate all Muslims (Islamophobia) just as much as the world’s most fanatic Islamists hate all Christians (Christianophobia) (“right back at you”). Those kind of people (Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”) (page 207) are also engaging in an undeclared civil war (such as the Trump supporters’ attack on the US Congress on January 6, 2021) against all the progressive-minded people favouring environmentalism, anti-racism and sexual diversity (page 206).
That being said, aside from the weaknesses that I already identified in the Dardot-Guégen-Laval-Sauvêtre book, they also repeatedly refused to describe “authoritarian liberalism” as a form of neofascism. Their definition of both classical fascism, and of neofascism, definitely did not include the idea of an authoritarian continuum, or spectrum, applying to both raving-lunatic varieties of fascism and neofascism, as well as to milder forms of the same ideology, promoting legal forms of civil war. It concentrates instead on upholding the ideal, completely totalitarian definition of fascism that was promoted back in the twentieth century by the traditional founders of that ideology, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. According to the authors of the 2021 book, classical fascism applied only to Italy and Germany, and could not be stretched as a definition, even back then, to include somewhat milder forms of fascism such as those that emerged in Vichy France, the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal or the Franco dictatorship in Spain (pages 272 and 294).
In my opinion, completely totalitarian control over an “ideal” fascist state did not take place anywhere, even in classical fascism, Mussolini having to deal with a partly independent Catholic Church, and Hitler having to deal with a partly independent German Army (the Wehrmacht). Classical fascism was also “exported” to non-Western countries back in the twentieth century, influencing more than a few ultra-right-wing Muslims back then, including the Mufti of Jerusalem, as well as the “Blue-Shirt” youth movement within the Nationalist Party of China, run by Madame Chiang (Soong Mei-ling). Another example was the pro-fascist movement inside the nationalist movement in India, run by former Congress Party president Chandra Bose.
Not to mention the military dictatorship that was set up in Japan from 1936 to 1945 which, even though it was not led by a formal fascist party, nevertheless resulted in Japanese imperialism committing as many atrocities, and killing as many people over all, as Nazi-German imperialism did during the same time period. And the fact that there were just as many Asian nationalists allying themselves for a time with imperial Japan, against Western imperialism, as there were European nationalists allying themselves with Nazi Germany against the USSR and its Western allies. To be sure, the fascist ideal of a national-socialist military phalanx was never fully developed outside Europe, but then it was never fully developed (in my opinion) even inside Europe.
In today’s world, it seems to me that there are several different forms of neofascism currently operating, quite often based on a form of religious fanaticism, including highly successful evangelical Christianity operating in the USA, parts of Africa and Latin America, as well as political Islamism that has taken over a large part of the Muslim world (especially Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan), including a large part of the Muslim diaspora in countries like France. Other examples of religious fanaticism include ultra-orthodox Judaism dominating today’s Israel and supported by a similar movement imbedded within the Jewish communities in the USA and Canada, while ultra-right-wing forms of Buddhism have also become very important in countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, along with the rise of ultra-right-wing Shintoism in Japan and ultra-right-wing Confucianism in the People’s Republic of China.
Many of those forms of neofascism also put a strong emphasis on ethnic exclusivism, combined with large dollops of racism, as in the USA (the Trump faction), China (“great Han chauvinism”), Japan, Poland, Hungary and so on. Many countries in Africa (Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, etc.) are also divided up into evangelical-Christian regions and political-Islamist regions, often compounded by tribal divisions. I completely disagree with the ridiculous prejudice of confining fascism and neofascism only to white, Christian countries. Even the communist movement in Iran sided with the ultra-right-wing Khomeini theocracy against the US puppet, the shah of Iran, before being completely eradicated by the ayatollah’s variety of Shiite neofascism.
In spite of the fact that the four French authors of the 2021 book refuse to accept a broad definition of fascism, and of neofascism, they nevertheless offered several hints pointing in the same direction as my interpretation. For example, they cited Ludwig von Mises’ point of view about how authoritarian liberalism does not condone open violence against its opponents in principle, but could nevertheless do so if the local situation in some country justified it (page 75). He also seems to have recognized the “positive role” that Italian fascism played in saving liberal civilization from the communist threat (page 93). (A point of view that Winston Churchill also shared prior to 1936.) Friedrich von Hayek also corresponded directly with Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, criticizing the latter’s 1933 constitution for offering insufficient guarantees of super-profit for large investors (page 103).
The authors of the 2021 book also made the mistake of interpreting army general Juan Peron’s post-war dictatorships (1946-1955 and 1973-1974) in Argentina as being essentially a form of left-wing populism (page 315), rather than recognizing the weirdly paradoxical fact that like the dictatorships of army general Gétulio Vargas in Brazil (1930-1945 and 1951-1954), took much of its inspiration from ultra-right-wing populism instead. The support that both of those dictators gave to economic nationalism, as an alternative to economic liberalism, does not mean that all economic nationalists back then always became dictators, as Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico (1934-1940) demonstrated quite well in his country.
Before leaving the four French authors’ fascinating attack on neoliberalism, I would also like to return to their failure to provide any kind of credible alternative to that vulture capitalist ideology in their book. After having written over 300 pages of brilliant denunciation of “authoritarian liberalism”, they added a very short, three-page dismissal of most of the possible left-wing alternatives, in particular rejecting any and all attempts, either violent or non-violent, of trying to form left-wing governments any more. In their view, both authoritarian communist and elected social-democratic formations in the future would simply repeat the mistakes that all such left-wing formations have made in the past.
Their alternative proposal was instead to construct a strictly non-governmental, non-organizational (philosophically anarchist) attempt to “coordinate” all the spontaneous, progressive movements that already exist (the ecology movement, the trade-union movement, the women’s liberation movement, etc.) using some kind of egalitarian-democratic correspondence network. An approach that only seems possible in countries like France, that still officially support (as of this writing) formal democracy and therefore tolerate a certain degree of freedom of expression. Which, in my opinion, would not last for five minutes against any kind of fascist counter-attack like the one that overthrew the Allende government in Chile back in 1973. That kind of event could take place again soon, not only in the world’s poorest countries, throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, but could also take place in North America and Europe, as soon as the countries in those regions also begin to suffer from massive crop failures.
Now I want to make a few more comments about the Kempf book from 2017. This author also pointed out quite appropriately that the world “communist” movement, centred initially on the USSR, in spite of being despotic and thoroughly distracted from its original goals, nevertheless forced most of the world’s capitalists, especially in the richer countries, to make quite a few concessions to the working-class during the duration of the Cold War (page 13). That movement, however, was severely undermined by China’s de facto abandonment of Marxism under Deng Xiao-ping, the ex-Communist Party refusing to abandon totalitarianism (as in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989), instead encouraging ordinary people to seek their “freedom” by striving to get rich in as many different ways as possible (page 14). The demise of the USSR and China’s exportation of low-cost goods to the rest of the world (page 19) contributed greatly to the victory of neoliberalism almost everywhere. Which triumphed, as I pointed out earlier, not only in the richest countries but also in poor countries like India, where it combined quite efficiently with fundamentalist hinduism (page 77), directed against minority populations.
Kempf devoted a large part of his book to lambasting many of the negative effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary world, some of which were not treated as well by the authors of the 2021 book. Such as the brutal increase of interest rates in 1981, which Kempf did not link to the war on inflation in the rich countries, but rather to the induced flight of capital away from poorer countries such as Mexico. He also denounced the fanatical intensification of neocolonialism throughout the “Third World” by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (page 18), draining even more value from the poor countries in the global South than before that time, in order to feed the enormous appetite for super-profits in the rich countries of the global North (page 15).
His analysis of the 2008 economic crisis (pages 43-45) was even more incisive, showing how the world’s largest banks started out by cynically combining sub-prime mortgages, in the USA and many other countries, with less worthless assets, and selling those combined packages to other investors. The inevitable unravelling of that massive fraud soon led to total bankruptcy for those same banks, most of which were then rescued from their inevitable failure by the US government, as well as by many other governments, which all stepped in to avoid the complete collapse of the entire world economy. China also lost an enormous sum of money invested back then in US Treasury bonds and credit agencies, that it then decided to re-invest all over again, as soon as “order” was restored in world markets.
The world’s largest private banks therefore succeeded in transferring most of their accumulated debt to those same governments. Which enabled most of the very same banks to achieve total recovery a little later on, lending their new-found money to the very same, by now heavily indebted governments. It is impossible to think of a worse way of doing monkey business (“quantitative easing”, page 73) than that, everyone’s taxes all over the world being shunted into saving the very same banks that caused the world’s most damaging economic crisis since the Great Depression. Such is the nature of vulture capitalism that all the world’s most important movers and shakers seem forever condemned to support it no matter how disgusting it gets, right up to the bitter end, in spite of all the very obvious consequences of acting in such an idiotic fashion.
Kempf concluded that the world is now being run by the stupidest ruling class in world history, which completely ignores all the most important problems, including the dangers of climate change, the inferno of Islamic terrorism, uncontrolled financial markets and ever-rising social inequality (page 78). One wonders, however, if Kempf nevertheless “overlooked” the antediluvian nature of fundamentalist movements inside every one of the world’s most important religions, and chose instead to only denounce the atavistic nature of Islamic fanaticism. As for terrorism as such, it is true that the Islamist movement prefers to murder thousands of people by having several Middle Eastern petroleum producers pay out millions of dollars to militant groups to do their dirty work. Other forms of religious fanaticism, however, also induce terrorist acts carried out by militant groups, but they much prefer to operate mostly through state terrorism instead (the USA, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc.), often using aerial bombardment, which usually ends up murdering quite a few more people than militant groups are capable of doing. Kempf also explained how the “war on terrorism”, adopted by countries like the USA, is also being used to considerably weaken human rights inside the formally democratic countries (page 76), an idea that he acknowledged to have borrowed from Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism”.
What I liked the most about Kempf’s book is the way in which he constantly linked together all the various crisis situations in the contemporary world, showing how the loss of control over every one of those crises, when treated separately as if they were all totally independent problems, instead intensifies the loss of control over the whole gang of them. The people in power, who according to Kempf should be acting decisively on every front to reduce tensions caused by each one of those crises, as well as by all of them running amok together and negatively influencing each other, are instead deliberately trying to make everything even worse than it already is. The ruling classes all over the world are very much part of the problem, and deliberately refuse to become part of the solution.
Unfortunately, in Kempf’s conclusion, “12 ways of avoiding a catastrophe”, he only manages to come up with a laundry list of what can only be described as different forms of wishful thinking: understand what is going on, measure your chances of winning, think about climate change as a solution to economic problems, use post-capitalist political tools (such as “low technology”), avoid both (private) capitalism and collectivism (state capitalism), unlock the system or else go to war against it, be radical because the situation is radical, deliver a message full of love, divide the oligarchy, don’t give up on trying to change existing institutions, use the weapons of peace (Gandhi), move forward by adopting a spiritual message. All of which seem to me to be more than a little bit utopian.
I would like to get back now to the McNally book on the zombie nature of global capitalism. He seems to have gotten the idea for his book (page 1) during the world economic crisis of 2008-2009, when “Time” magazine declared the zombie to be the official monster of the recession, a new flood of zombie and vampire films came out in the US at the same time, and the Goldman Sachs firm was being compared to “a great vampire squid” (Taibbi 2009). McNally’s take on all that in his introduction was to explain how the grotesque nature of modern capitalism has become banal and therefore relatively invisible in developed countries, that have come to accept the commodification of everything as a fact of life. In his own research, most of it carried out in sub-Saharan Africa, the fact that similarly complete forms of commodification have only been imposed on some populations during the very recent period of neoliberal globalization, means that they are relatively more visible (page 2).
As he described the situation in great detail in the body of his work, the zombie and vampire themes that dominate popular folklore in countries like Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, the Congo, South Africa and Tanzania, have incorporated new stories of recent commodification into their witchcraft tales. He cited for example the book published in 2000 by Luise White, “Speaking with vampires: Rumour and history in colonial Africa”, about the folk interpretation of modern work routines being imposed on firemen and game-rangers during the twentieth century, concerning the forced quantification of time (page 196). For example, when local people noticed that firemen were being obliged to carry out drills and polish machines whenever they were not out fighting fires, they interpreted what they saw as employees falling under the control of witches using spells to oblige those workers to carry out work perceived as completely unnecessary, during their down time (page 200).
In the earlier part of the colonial period, according to McNally, European traders had also interpreted the sacred objects that African people refused to trade as being modern fetishes (page 202), in the same way that Europeans involved in much more recent, neoliberal globalization also interpret contemporary witchcraft stories as being excellent examples of the same sort of primitive human customs. McNally, however, decided to turn those accusations about primitiveness upside-down by using “dialectical reversal”, interpreting the European belief in “the universality and naturalness” of the market economy as being just another form of fetishism (page 203), not only during the early colonial period but also much more recently.
According to McNally, market logic is not universal at all, but has simply been imposed on people all over the world during the entire history of capitalism. The first part of his book was devoted to the description of dozens of examples of similar conflict between competing versions of reality, pre-capitalist and capitalist, during the early-modern history of England. Back then, English commoners as well as those in continental Europe reacted in similarly “irrational” ways to the dissection for “scientific” purposes being practised on the corpses of common criminals, who were often deliberately killed not so much because of their criminal acts, but specifically to provide the dissectors with a sufficiently large number of corpses on which to practise (page 59). McNally even analyzed Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s nineteenth-century “Frankenstein” novel (pages 88-101) as a form of fictional popularization of real-world grave-robbing.
McNally also devoted quite a few more pages in his book on describing now much more recent and intensified forms of commodification are focusing on the “immaterial assets” of companies like Enron (page 164), constituting the next higher level of the capitalist transformation of absolutely everything into exploitable assets, the climate, politics, money, whatever, so that all risk can become quantifiable, and measurable, on a single metric (page 163). McNally also included an extensive chapter on Karl Marx’s frequent use of zombie and vampire metaphors in his description of capitalism, both in the industrial countries and in the colonial world (pages 113-173), Throughout his entire book, McNally succeeded in analyzing the historical development of “the cultural economy of the global market-system”, especially by using material found in popular literature and folklore.
The first thing that came to mind when I was reading his book was how very similar some of the popular stories from early-modern England and from contemporary, sub-Saharan Africa, strangely resemble the Q-Anon myths lying behind much of the popular support for Donald Trump in the USA. A very large number of people nowadays believe in such absurd ideas that entire sections of the US establishment, such as the Democratic Party and the Hollywood entertainment industry, organized the systematic, pedophile exploitation and murder of hundreds of thousands of children in the USA. This is at least as bizarre and as frightening as any of the zombie, vampire and witchcraft stories presented in McNally’s book.
Finally, according to a newspaper article that I read more recently, the zombie nature of contemporary capitalism has also become a popular metaphor even among pro-capitalist sources, such as the Bank for International Settlements. That illustrious institution recently denounced what they called “the zombie corporations in the fossil-fuel sector”, most of them being heavily indebted, as well as having a hard time respecting their contracts, or innovating, or investing, or avoiding constant decline.
Finally, I would also like to add a few more comments about Jacques Attali’s book on the economic history of the Jewish people, published back in 2002. In this case, I will not attempt any kind of chapter by chapter analysis of his work, as I did with the books that were more pertinent to my own investigation. Attali set out to show how all the different groups of people identifying with Judaism over the past three millennia, the original Jewish population as well as all the other peoples who converted to Judaism along the way (such as the Khazar people, introduced on page 183), tried to master the ideas contained in the founding Jewish scriptures (the Talmud) and to remain faithful to its precepts, at least to the best of their ability.
Attali pointed out, however, that the tremendously complicated relationship that the Jewish peoples lived through with the often anti-Semitic empires that were set up over the centuries, particularly the Christian and the Muslim empires, made it impossible for them to remain faithful to the Jewish scriptures on many different occasions. During all those centuries of historically varying kinds of economic activity, most of the Jews in the world generally belonged to the same “inferior” social classes (peasants, workers, artisans, etc.) as most of the non-Jews.
As Attali described it, however, a small portion of the Jewish population, in every region and in every period of history, hob-knobbed with the ruling classes of each one of those non-Jewish empires. Some of the richest people in that small group of Jews were constantly being pushed by non-Jewish big-wigs into different forms of what we now call finance capitalism, performing services that Christian or Muslim rulers officially eschewed, such as loaning often enormous sums of money at often inflated rates of interest (usury). A practise that did not always conform to the original intent coming from Jewish scripture, forbidding Jews from doing anything that could harm people from inside, or outside, the Jewish community.
According to Attali, the usurious practises of a very small portion of the entire Jewish population were then seized upon by anti-Semitic activists from within the equally rich (and much more powerful) non-Jewish ruling classes in those same empires, as “proof” of the “inherent perfidy” of the Jews. Ridiculous myths about rich Jewish money-lenders trying to take over the world were then invented by those activists to “justify” not only the refusal to pay any interest whatsoever on those loans, but also to periodically persecute the entire Jewish population in any given territory, to the extent, in hundreds of different cases, of killing off all the Jews that they could find, whether money-lenders or not. The pogroms of all the earlier periods of history eventually led to the Nazi Holocaust, the ultra-murderous attempt (six million victims) to physically eliminate all the European Jews.
In spite of all that horror, however, Attali claimed that the Jewish people as a whole should be proud of having in the course of time invented the concepts of capital and capitalism, since according to him what he called “capitalist ethics” strongly resemble some of the arguments that were originally written down in the Jewish scriptures. As I pointed out earlier in this blogpost, however, it is difficult, to say the least, to find anything truly “ethical” about most of the forms of capitalism, particularly in the contemporary world. In my opinion, Attali’s attempt to find something positive about the “invention” of usurious finance capitalism resembles the equally erroneous attempt to describe countries like the USA as being liberal democracies.
In reality, such countries only seem to be more democratic than “honestly authoritarian”, or totalitarian countries, where for example, the exercise of freedom of expression is often punishable by death. In fact, there is nothing honestly “democratic” about any country in which a very small number of ultra-rich people lord it over a very large number of much poorer people, not only in everyday life but also by controlling most of the legislative activity going on. Which observation also emphatically applies to today’s Israel.
The equality that people in theoretically liberal-democratic countries encounter at the ballot-box (one adult, one vote) is never replicated in any form of true equality among the social classes, nor for that matter among the variety of ethnic groups living in every country, which are often treated as second-class citizens in ways resembling the South African apartheid of the Boer regime. The richest people in such countries are thousands of times more powerful than the poorest people in those same places, in every bit as systemic a way that racism and sexism are also systemic. In the contemporary world, particularly since the rise of neoliberalism, even the formal differences, such as they are, between totalitarian, authoritarian and officially democratic countries are also fading quickly away.
In conclusion, all the books and articles that I read last summer simply reinforce my conviction that the world’s most reactionary ideologies are currently being used, even more than before, by thoroughly unscrupulous, ultra-rich and ultra-powerful people to keep the vast majority of the world’s population under their control. Imperialism is being used all over the world by more powerful countries in order to dominate less powerful countries, in several different, overlapping layers, an ideology practised not only by the USA and several European countries, but also by China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brazil and dozens of other countries, including places like Canada and Australia.
All those nations also practise militarism in various different, overlapping forms, by developing and possessing nuclear weapons, by belonging to and participating in military alliances like NATO, by financing militant-group terrorism, or by practising state terrorism. The recent nuclear pact between the USA, the UK and Australia, aimed at containing China, is only the most recent example, an alliance that deliberately excluded not only France, but also Canada and New Zealand.
Extractivism is also being used and abused just as much as it was before, with most governments and private corporations only paying lip-service to the dire need to cut back drastically on the widespread use of fossil fuels (the source of 80% of all energy produced everywhere) in particular. Unfettered elitism (in the form of neoliberalism) continues to widen the unprecedentedly enormous gap between the social classes, combining with ever more severe forms of racism, sexism (misogyny) and age-ism, to a greater or to a lesser degree in all the regions of the world. Ethnic exclusivism and religious fanaticism are also behind most of the impetus for the worldwide return of the entire gamut of the fascist spectrum.
All of which are also contributing to, or profiting from, other equally damaging trends, such as having millions of people consuming some of the world’s most dangerous substances as “recreational drugs”, the ever-increasing importance of organized crime in almost every country, the number and severity of ongoing wars between rival street gangs and the ever-increasing use of over-abundant fire-arms by ever-larger numbers of people. To that must be added the constant decline in educational levels of achievement throughout the world, even in the richest countries. As well as the constant blurring of the formerly clear-cut distinctions between scientific explanations of reality with the irrational, other-worldly beliefs of religious fanaticism and the equally stultifying belief in all the different kinds of superstition. True believers in all the world’s major religions are no longer capable of noticing how ridiculous it is to insist on total identification with metaphysical myth-making, while simultaneously upholding completely contradictory beliefs in anti-religious, superstitious nonsense. The anti-vaccination crowd being only the latest addition to the muddled absence of any form of elementary logic.
The fight against the current pandemic and the capacity we humans could be developing to fight against a much-anticipated wave of succeeding pandemics in the future, are both being severely undermined by the almost total lack of solidarity and cooperation with the world’s poorest countries, where the most dangerous variants are constantly developing. Countries all over the world are also severely mistreating health workers, such as nurses, by forcing them into accepting such neofascist practises as compulsory overtime, while simultaneously allowing thousands of those very same health workers to remain unvaccinated.
At the same time, even more feeble attempts at dealing with climate change are also being severely undermined through the taking over of the entire world by the reactionary, ultra-right-wing ideologies that I have been talking about in this most recent blogpost, as well as in most of the other blogposts that preceded it. In my opinion, it is the complete and total lack of genuine morality which is the main cause of the recent triumph of all the world’s most reactionary ideologies. Fake “left-wing” people are deliberately misinterpreting the fight against ultra-right-wing ideologies in order to promote their own self-centred agendas, including rich people from poor countries getting university grants that were originally designed to help poor people of all ethnic origins get access to higher education.
At the same time, many universities, that were supposed to serve as bastions of free scientific inquiry, have instead become cess-pools of reverse discrimination. Rather than seeking greater degrees of equality between the social classes, between genders, between the so-called “races”, between succeeding generations and between people coming from every possible religion and culture, the fake-woke people have joined the neoliberal elitists in promoting civil war between every possible group of people, exploiting every division to make things a whole lot worse, instead of a whole lot better.
If such immoral and irrational ways of thinking continue to prevail all over the world, I do not hold out a great deal of hope for the future. Many people in the ecology movement are very afraid of the horribly disastrous effects of an overall increase in the mean worldwide temperature on the surface of this planet, by three, four or five degrees of warming by the year 2100. Given the descriptions that I have been furnishing throughout this blogpost, however, it seems to me that there very well may be no one alive in 2100, who will still be capable of making a coherent scientific measurement of anything at all. So we may never find out what the answer will turn out be to that particular question.
