The “White Trash” controversy: poverty is systemic everywhere (not just in the USA)
Nancy Isenberg’s 2016 book, “White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America”, that I finished reading only recently, is a brilliant work, exceptionally well-researched and also very entertaining. In this blogpost, I want to continue my usual practice by referring to this book, not just as a major contribution to the author’s chosen field, as most reviewers do. Instead, I want to put the emphasis on how that extremely insightful book can also be used to help people all around the world improve their understanding of what has been going on, and is still going on, everywhere else as well, right now.
In my view, “White Trash” is not just about how social relations were set up over the past few centuries in one particular part of the world. It is also about how such immensely destructive class distinctions continue to prevent all human beings from realizing their full potential. Over the past several millennia, an extremely large number of people in the lower classes have been very poorly treated, on every continent, by a much smaller number of people in the upper classes. Rich and powerful people have been discriminating against poor and powerless people, simply because they are poor and vulnerable, in the same prejudiced ways that racist and sexist people so often discriminate against their own chosen victims, with equally harmful effects on the overall development of every society.
However, given the onset of climate change, caused by massive pollution of human origin, if in the immediate future the rich go on mistreating the poor in the same destructive ways that the huge corporations belonging to those same people have also been mistreating nature over the past several decades, we run a horrible risk of putting ourselves on the endangered species list. In order to motivate not only the world’s antediluvian leading lights, but also billions of “ordinary people”, to fight against massive pollution of the natural world instead of promoting it even further, we need to convince everyone of the urgent need to pull together in a common cause, on a global scale, without wasting any more precious time.
Continuing to treat all the world’s very numerous poor people like trash is the worst possible way to motivate the overwhelming majority of the world’s population to participate fully in accomplishing that excessively difficult task. The fact that, for example, one-third of Pakistan’s entire territory, including a large portion of its prime agricultural land, is currently under water is only one of the most recent of a whole series of environmental catastrophes, adversely affecting all of us in thousands of ways. The most devastating effect being to put our food supply in great danger, not just in one of the world’s poorest countries, but everywhere else as well.
The Isenberg book set off a major controversy in the USA by proving over and over again that the “American dream” has only come true for a tiny portion of the overall population, not only recently (as in the “Rust Belt” scandal) but rather since the very beginning of its existence. She demonstrated quite convincingly that for every period of US history, from the 1607 founding of the first permanent European colony in what later became the USA, all the way down to when her book was published, every ruling generation in that country has succeeded in completely lording it over not only its racially-defined minorities, but also over what quickly became its much more numerous, white (European-origin) population.
Keeping the major portion of the white population in a permanent condition of poverty, often extreme poverty, even in what soon became the world’s richest country, has been used as a very effective weapon to make sure that most of those people remain exclusively focused on such practical tasks as securing their next meal. That is to say, almost as much as most of the “other” people also living in the USA, belonging to that country’s wide variety of racially-defined minorities, have also been kept down, even more severely. The vast majority of the “white” population, as well as of the so-called “coloured” populations (as if white was not in itself a colour), have all been prevented from contesting their horribly subordinated lot, in any way that would threaten the stability of the over-all class structure.
In other words, the theory of “American exceptionalism”, according to which the USA somehow managed to become much more democratic than any other empire on this planet, was a deliberately created myth, continually re-imposed from one period to another. A myth that has been actively promoted by every succeeding elitist centre of power in that imperial nation, during the past four centuries. Most white people in the USA are still being severely oppressed by that country’s rulers nowadays, the only difference from the past being that these days, it has become “radical chic” to allow a slightly larger number of individuals coming from “racial” minorities, or from the female portion of the population, to also become rich and famous, as long as the vast majority of them remain just as oppressed as they ever were. Rich white men still dominate society like they used to do, but some minor exceptions can be made in today’s “America”, as well as in a few other countries.
After I finished reading “White Trash”, it was still very much on my mind when I also started reading several other publications, such as the trans-humanist book from Germany entitled, “A short history of humanity: A new history of old Europe” (English translation, 2021), by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe, originally published in 2019. I will be getting back to that book later on in this blogpost, as well as to a much less optimistic new book (2022) by Québec philosopher Alain Deneault, “Moeurs: de la gauche cannibale à la droite vandale” (“Mores: from left-wing cannibals to right-wing vandals”). I also intend to refer again briefly, this time around, to still another book that I already commented upon in some of my previous blogposts, David Lowenthal’s “The past is a foreign country—revisited” (2015), this time for his insights into the historical treatment of social divisions.
Yet another book that I would also like to reference in this blogpost is an international best-seller, “Managing for Dummies” (1996), by Bob Nelson and Peter Economy, that I decided to also read just recently. I wanted to see for myself if the most popular US promoters of neoliberalism (also known as market-liberalism), back in the 1990s, were as openly reactionary as the founders of that same ideology were depicted in a 2021 history of neoliberalism. That French history book, “Le choix de la guerre civile” (“Choosing civil war”), written by four leftists (Pierre Dardot, Haud Guégen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre), was the opening source for another one of my relatively recent blogposts, “The zombie market promotes civil war”, published on February 10, 2021.
What I found out was that the authors of “Managing for Dummies” also totally deserved every bit of severe criticism that those French authors had meted out to the founders of market-liberalism, people like Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek. All the promoters of neoliberalism, whether they were considered to be “eminent intellectuals” or just “hack promoters”, of what soon became the officially adopted economic ideology of most of the world’s countries, from 1979 to the present, really did set out to greatly intensify social-class divisions in every corner of this planet.
As the authors of the French book pointed out, the neoliberal movement also deliberately and consciously promoted the rise of ultra-right-wing populist movements in every country to help convince “ordinary people” to support market liberalism, even though it is, and was, diametrically opposed to the common people’s best interests. Neoliberalism is still being just as actively promoted by similar ideologues right now. This worldwide “open conspiracy”, a long-lasting, all-out war on every opposing socio-economic point of view, has also succeeded in intensifying the equally worldwide private-capitalist and state-capitalist assault on the long-suffering natural environment.
Before I get back to those fascinating books in greater detail, however, the first publication that I want to comment upon here, in order to compare its message with that of the “White Trash” book, was a 162-page collection entitled “L’histoire des mythes fondateurs: Voyage dans l’imaginaire de l’humanité”, that came out in France in 2022. This was a comprehensive compilation of dozens of thumbnail descriptions of the entire world’s most important political myths, composed by a wide variety of authors, and published as a collaborative effort by two prestigious French magazines, “Le Monde” and “La Vie” (“The World” and “Life”).
The organizers of that collection tried to include every kind of founding myth that still resonates in today’s world, not only those belonging to the world’s currently dominant religious sects, but also those belonging to the world’s most important empires and indigenous cultures. They included quite a large selection of contemporary ideological myths, such as racism, nationalism, communism, market-liberalism and trans-humanism. In that collection, the thumbnail portrait corresponding to Nancy Isenberg’s chosen topic, written by “Le Monde” journalist Corine Lesnes, and illustrated with a photo of the Trump supporters assault on the Capitol Building in Washington, was appropriately entitled “L’ambition messianique des États-Unis” (“The messianic ambition of the USA”).
Given the very small number of pages allotted to each myth, the overall result was, inevitably, a great deal less well-researched, in each case, than the much more carefully constructed “White Trash” book. However, judging from the bibliographies accompanying those texts, my own reaction was to believe that if most of those French authors had been given the time and the support necessary to try and write the same kind of painstaking work as in Isenberg’s highly successful effort, they would most likely have succeeded. Many of them may already have done so, since I have not yet got around to reading any of their much longer contributions. In my view, however, none of the world’s currently dominant myths are based on any more solid foundations than is the myth of “American exceptionalism”.
Every one of those myths is constantly being used by the ruling elites in every part of the world as a way of controlling the actions of every socially inferior class in every country, brainwashing hundreds of millions of isolated individuals into identifying completely with each, pre-arranged, “family portrait” being offered. From the rulers point of view, all the world’s successfully befuddled victims under their control become just so many minuscule, powerless cogs bumping along inside several thousand propaganda machines set up over the centuries, and manipulated by much smaller groups of people dominating every culture and every country. In spite of enormous differences between each competing cultural portrait, all the world’s dominant people nevertheless belong to a social class based on possessing immense wealth and power. This is the main method that has been used throughout the ages, and is still being used nowadays, to convince “voluntary slaves” the world over to continue doing whatever it is that their “betters” want them to do.
Voluntary slavery, as opposed to militarily-imposed slavery, refers to the very numerous ways by which most of the ordinary people belonging to the world’s socially “inferior” classes often come to believe in the mythological projections, or portraits, that the ruling classes in each period, and in each part of the world, have offered to them over several succeeding millennia. The poverty weapon in particular has been used to help control dominated social classes in every one of the thousands of empires set up on every continent since “civilized” imperialism was first introduced about six thousand years ago.
It turns out that “America” (a word that applies to every country in the Western hemisphere and not just to one of them) is not exceptional in any way, among all the other empires on this planet, other than that of having forged the world’s most successful imperial adventure. Every other empire currently competing with the USA for hegemony always copies ancient empires just as much as the USA does, by putting the poverty weapon front and centre in its overall strategy for regional and global domination in the twenty-first century.
In today’s world, all the ordinary people currently joining ultra-right-wing populist movements, such as those who supported Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, become very much a part of the problem when they mistakenly identify their legitimate, anti-elitist yearnings with those of an extremely disgusting demagogue like Trump. People like him never have the slightest intention of helping out “regular Joes”, much less “regular Janes”, by fighting against the ruling elite in any real way, for the obvious reason that Trump and his upper-class associates belong, and always have belonged, to the ultra-conservative wing of that very same elite.
Any of the ordinary people supporting demagogic leaders currently in power elsewhere, whether they were elected or not, have also been hoodwinked by similar leaders in dozens of other countries. Current examples include Great Britain’s new Thatcherite prime minister, Liz Truss, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Norendra Modi in India, Ali Khamenei in Iran, Mohamed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, and Naftali Bennett in Israel. In spite of the enormous political, economic, social and cultural differences between all those disparate countries, the leaders of every ultra-right-wing populist movement represented in that list, and dozens more like them in the rest of the world, whether currently in power or not, only pretend to represent the common people in order to seize power, and hold on to power, for as long as possible. The same characterization also applies to the ultra-right-wing coalition that was recently elected in Italy, now dominated by a pro-fascist party very closely related to Mussolini’s original movement.
To be sure, many of the elected reactionaries in that list have to deal with rival political formations on a more or less even keel with their own parties, a problem that is not shared by any of the autocrats in the list who did not get into power, nor risk losing it, in the same fashion. Liz Truss, for example, the Conservative Party chieftain recently chosen from within her party to ride out Boris Johnson’s term of power after he was removed from office, is currently trailing the Labour Party in the opinion polls, and risks losing power herself during the next general elections. The political situation is even worse for Jair Bolsonaro, a well-known Trump imitator who has lost a great deal of popularity in recent years and is trailing his arch-rival, Lula da Silva from the Workers Party, in the second phase of the current presidential elections. The grip of Kaczynski’s party on Poland seems to be firmer than Bolsonaro’s grip on Brazil, or on Truss’s grip on the UK, but not as firm as that of Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, or Modi in India (who has also reinforced his country’s horrendously inhumane caste system). As for Israel’s Bennett, his power is on hold right now, since he was recently replaced by a more centrist chieftain, the current leader of the other half of that country’s curious “alternate” coalition.
Even formerly social-democratic Sweden now seems to be governed by a coalition of traditional right-wing parties and a much newer, ultra-right-wing party. This extraordinary event seems to have been provoked by a variety of factors, the most important of which being the fact that Sweden agreed not so long ago to let in large numbers of immigrants coming from several different Muslim-majority countries, like Germany and France had already done before that. Unfortunately, in all of of those cases, the leaders of those countries did not seem to take into account the enormous influence, on so many of those true believers, of the recent rise in the Islamist variety of ultra-right-wing populism. Which is one of the antediluvian movements that I have been denouncing in my blog, along with all the other excessively reactionary ideologies in this world, over the past several years.
The Muslim world has undergone a cataclysmic change during the past several decades, returning to a completely atavistic interpretation of Islam, similar to the one that dominated the Catholic section of the Christian religion during the reign of Pius IX (1846-1878). With the result that millions of today’s Muslims, all over the world, no longer support any of the more “moderate” factions within the Muslim community, which tolerate the presence in their midst of people from other religions, including even a few atheists here and there, without going on the warpath against them. Unfortunately, even if in some countries most believers may still belong to the “silent majority” of Muslims, the dominant trend nowadays in the Muslim world is towards active support for militant proselytism, in which everyone who is not already an ultra Islamist must be won over to their cause, by whatever means necessary.
A large part of the motivation for this huge change in attitude has come from Western imperialism, not only because of long-standing, colonial and/or neocolonial takeovers of Muslim-majority countries, from Morocco all the way over to Indonesia, but also by much more recent attacks on such countries as Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. To be sure, the resulting revival of the Islamist plague in most of the Muslim world was not caused exclusively by Western aggression, but was also helped along by internal evolution in the centuries-old conflict between the “moderate” and the “militant” versions of Islam.
The current revival of the Islamist form of ultra-right-wing populism means that accusing many non-Muslims of having adopted the brand of racism known as “Islamophobia” is only appropriate if it is still being directed against the more moderate versions of Islam. It certainly does not apply to the situation that arises when non-Muslims refuse to kow-tow to murderous Islamist extremism. What every non-Muslim should still denounce, however, with equal vehemence, is any violent and murderous reaction against all Muslims, coming from within non-Muslim communities.
In reality, most of the varieties of atavistic populism that currently exist on this planet, from whatever region, are very closely linked with ultra-conservative religious movements, that all promote literal interpretations of several venerated religious writings, or “scriptures”, from the distant past. This is not only true of the leading factions in a wide variety of Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, but also of many other religious organizations and sects in dozens of other countries. All the world’s religions have always been based on some form or another of irrational or super-natural belief, which means that they can be more readily transformed into sectarian extremism than can some of the more secular ideologies.
Ultra-orthodox forms of Christianity have also had a huge impact on exceptionally reactionary political movements in countries like Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and the USA, as well as in many other places. Political and religious extremism also combine forces in numerous Buddhist countries (Myanmar, Sri Lanka, etc.), as well as motivating the Hindu revivalist movement in India. Japan suffers not only from Shintoist and Buddhist extremism, but also from the ever-growing influence of the “Unification Church” (the “Moonies” of Korean origin), that seems to have taken over the entire leadership of the long-dominant Liberal-Democratic Party in that country.
Meanwhile, in France, the most important ultra-right-wing movements are currently being led by Christian or Jewish reactionaries, a situation that seems to have resulted in the formation of a newly-concocted “leftist” coalition, that has opportunistically entered into an extremely odd arrangement with the Islamist minority in that country, setting up a peculiar new hybrid known as Islamo-gauchisme (“left-wing Islamism”). This in spite of the fact that France has suffered more in recent years than any other Western country from Islamist assassins. Practically every country in the world is currently grappling with some form or another of ultra-right-wing political-religious combinations.
Even more than traditional right-wing politicians, or middle of the road “centrists”, or self-defined left-wing leaders, each ultra-right-wing chieftain necessarily supports an approach to government that is based on one form or another of apartheid, or national-socialism, claiming to particularly represent a “chosen people” in each affected country. “Coloured” people living in the USA are not considered to be part of the “core group” of white people in that country, just like Celtic minorities living in the UK are similarly excluded from the Anglo-Saxon core group, non-Russian minorities are excluded in the Russian Federation, indigenous people in Brazil, non-Turkish minorities living in the Republic of Turkey, non-Hindu minorities living in India, non-Chinese minorities living in the People’s Republic of China, non-Iranian minorities living in Iran, non-Saudis living in Saudi Arabia, non-Jewish people living in Israel, and so on in dozens of other infected countries.
All those forms of apartheid, or national-socialism, may not always be as ferociously violent as the kind of apartheid that used to exist under the Boer regime in South Africa, nor as the ultra-extremist kind of national-socialism that used to exist in Nazi Germany. But even when those two regimes did exist in the past, other countries back then also lived under similar regimes, that were often less violent than those two parties were, while still fitting into the overall pattern of imposing some form of apartheid, or national-socialism, on each country.
Each one of those ultra-conservative regimes, past and present, also adopted expansionist slogans similar to the one that the Trump movement recently came up with in the USA: “Make America Great Again”. Each country living under an ultra-right-wing government always believes in making its own empire great again, just like it used to be in some real or imagined period in the recent, or the distant past. Each new, militarily-oriented, “imperial-revivalist” administration always denounces the somewhat less reactionary regimes that used to be in power at some point in the past, but that are considered by ultra-right-wing elements to be responsible for that country’s “recent decline”, because of their “sissy” or “insufficiently patriotic” approach to government.
It ought not to be forgotten, however, that even if each ultra-right movement in power, or about to take power, somewhere or other, has intensified a previously-established policy favouring each particular core group, the difference between the privileged treatment of the core group and the significantly inferior treatment of the non-core populations should not be over-emphasized. As was pointed out over and over again in Isenberg’s book, most of the people belonging to the core populations also belong, nevertheless, to a severely under-privileged class of people, no matter which political stance is currently in power. The ruling classes in every country never let the “ordinary” people, regardless of their sex or their cultural origins, get too big for their britches under any regime.
As I underlined earlier in this blogpost, groups of people like the USA’s “poor white trash” are never allowed to be genuinely freed from their status as “inferior” people, and are always required to remain as poor as possible. Their real advantages over the non-core populations certainly did exist, and still do exist all over the world, but most of the pledges that ultra-right-wing movements made to core populations have been, and still are, much more based on propaganda (fake news) and deception than on anything even remotely approaching equal status with the real rulers. The relatively few people belonging to the dominant classes in every country always possess a great deal more wealth and power than do any of the hundreds of millions of people belonging to the lower ranks of society.
Nancy Isenberg’s second major contribution to the world, and not just to the USA, was to describe in considerable detail how equally successful the leading lights in that particular country have been in manipulating those vast numbers of poor people, of whatever cultural origin, into blaming themselves for their plight. As in every other part of the world, the USA’s thoroughly prejudiced elitists have been practising widespread psychological manipulation over their charges, by constantly denouncing the kind of “typical, low-life behaviour” (abandoning the family farm, refusing to work hard, letting their sexual appetites run amok, etc.), that those powerful elitists so readily associate with all the “lower-class” people under their control. Without, of course, giving any consideration to the more realistic possibility that although many of those “inferior” people really do behave in many of those socially harmful ways, this is most certainly not true of all of them, nor even of most of them. At least not any more than the rich and the powerful people also do, to a much more devastating extent.
Those same extremely hypocritical rulers also go the extra mile, at every possible juncture, promoting and encouraging the very same kinds of wayward behaviour among their unsuspecting victims that those same overlords officially claim to be opposing. The people in power everywhere on this planet do everything that they can to convince the people under their control that all the dominated ones deserve their fate. The dominant classes propaganda, whenever it is successful, “justifies”, from their point of view, the imposition of inferior status on all those masses of poor people, of whatever origin, by those who only pretend to be their social “superiors”. Particularly insofar as their own significantly less attractive mores are concerned.
Although Isenberg focused a large part of her effort on the “poor white trash” originating in rural communities, particularly in the southern states, upper-crust domination of the entire population applies just as much to “under-class” people living in urban settings throughout that country, as Isenberg herself repeatedly emphasized. Nevertheless, she does not focus very much in her book on several other aspects of the history of class relations in the USA, such as union organizing in general, leading to the founding of such diverse movements as the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World or the Congress of Industrial Organizations. As a result, she did not put much emphasis on reformist or anti-capitalist influence among working people, such as it was in the past. To find out more about those aspects of social-class history in the USA, we have to consult other sources.
Every honest teacher of history, of any particular country or civilization, needs to include material about the majority of the population during any kind of proper course preparation. I did my best to do just that forty years ago when I was researching social divisions, as well as everything else that I thought pertinent, to prepare college-level courses on US history, as well as on the history of several other countries. But I certainly would have liked to have known much more back then about everything that Isenberg contributed in her book, a lot of which was new to me.
In my view, class relations ought to be the main focus of history teaching, all over the world, rather than being shunted off to one side as they usually are in most “general” histories. That sort of teaching would have helped us understand how millions of thoroughly confused “ordinary people” ended up supporting ultra-right-wing governments in the past, including national-socialist movements in the twentieth century, as well as similar pro-fascist organizations in today’s world. Including the less-well-off people who so foolishly joined billionaire Donald Trump’s utterly cynical, ultra-right populist campaign for the presidency in 2016, and who seem to be repeating exactly the same horrible mistake right now.
For me, the best parts of Isenberg’s book were the hundreds of quotes that she was able to gather together for every period of US history, coming from well-known propagandists, corporate moguls and leading politicians. She started off with the British patricians who first began ridding their country of their own “waste people”, by sending most of them off to overseas colonies like those that became the USA, then continued on with the “Founding Fathers”, who were so grateful to have received such large quantities of “human trash” from the “mother country”, and then on down to the leading decision-makers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who also enjoyed receiving millions more poverty-stricken immigrants from throughout Europe, as well as from Africa, Asia, “Latin America” and Canada (both English-speaking and French-speaking people).
The US politician who seemed to me to have summed up the best those thoroughly cynical attitudes during that entire process was Lyndon Johnson, in one of his favourite homilies. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best coloured man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” (page 264)
This kind of eminently racist “divide and conquer” strategy of domination has also been very much reinforced over the centuries by the other major aspect of American exceptionalism, the “self-made man” mythology. Millionaires and billionaires in the USA, as well as everywhere else in the world, people such as Donald Trump for example, constantly attempt to convince “lesser folks” that they “earned” every last cent that they ever made all by themselves, without any help from any other rich and powerful people, in business or in government. Such as Trump’s well-established father for example, the numerous bankers who kept on loaning him gobs of money after every one of his numerous bankruptcies, or the thoroughly opportunist big-shots currently running the Republican Party.
Isenberg adroitly describes, over and over again in every chapter, how so many of the USA’s “ordinary” people have been led to copy the self-made man strategy by claiming that they never personally benefited from government largesse during any of the numerous economic downturns in the past, such as the Roosevelt regime’s “hand-outs” during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many of the same “poor white trash” also justified their ideological class collaboration by looking down on any of those “other folks” with darker skins who they claimed, without offering any proof, were the main recipients of all that cash.
Needless to say, “White Trash” has not only been praised by hundreds of reviewers in the USA and elsewhere, it has also been denounced by hundreds of others. One of the main themes that Isenberg’s opponents have seized upon has been the rise of the “middle class” since the end of the Second World War, in the USA as well as in several other relatively rich countries. Unfortunately, that very-poorly-defined term has become yet another myth used to once again justify the ever-increasing income gap between the social classes.
The fact that several million people, particularly in some of the richer countries, did quite well for themselves in recent times does not mean that a much larger number of poorer people should also be included as part of the same “middle” class. Even nowadays, when many formerly middle-class people have been pushed out of that category by the global pandemic, or by the return of monetary inflation, they are still often referred to as “middle class” anyway. Or, as I found out by reading several recent newspaper articles, some observers even refer to them using the Orwellian newspeak term of “low-income middle class”. Many other people in the world’s poorer countries are also referred to as “middle class” even though their purchasing power was, and still is, many times inferior to that of the people genuinely considered to be “middle class” in any of the richer countries.
This is where I would like to refer again to David Lowenthal’s 2015 book that I mentioned earlier, “The past is a foreign country—Revisited”. Lowenthal’s extremely erudite, 660-page hardback was a wide-ranging analysis, backed up by thousands of well-researched footnotes, focusing on the many different ways by which the past has been misrepresented over the years by all sorts of important people, including hundreds of eminent scholars. Towards the end of his book, he cited an article originally published in 2011 by the “Onion” periodical, quoting former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, according to whom the ever-growing income gap between the rich and the poor was a positive development, not a negative one: “There’s no greater privilege than watching it grow bigger and bigger every day” (page 588).
That enormous income gap is still growing larger nowadays, eleven years later, in spite of everything that has happened since then, and shows no signs whatsoever of slowing down. People like Blankfein still enjoy watching it grow because they are convinced, just like the founders of neoliberalism (Walter Lippmann and Friedrich von Hayek) were also convinced, that “civilization” itself depends for its very survival on having rich people lord it over poor people all over the world. Lowenthal concluded his book by claiming that he was mystified as to why so many scholars constantly misinterpret the past, in so many different ways. It seems to me, however, that at least insofar as social relations are concerned, by quoting Blankfein, as well as several other sources like him, he has provided his own answer to his question, without specifically acknowledging that fact in his book.
The very few people who sit on top of the world, as well as the elitist scholars who support such class-based domination, constantly misinterpreted the history of social relations in the past, in the same prejudiced ways that they still deliberately misinterpret social relations in the present. Prejudice against poor people, in favour of rich people, is “justified” in their minds by the perceived need to support a small minority of “civilized” elitists against the onslaught of “the barbarian hordes” of poor people. It is not just a question of whether or not poor and powerless people, of whatever cultural origin, possess the necessary skills to truly participate in building civilization; most of them do.
Past and present, it is really a question of the world’s elitists refusing to distinguish between good and bad behaviour among poor people for pre-determined reasons that are quite similar to those used by racists and by misogynists. Racists believe, irrationally, that good or bad behaviour depends largely on physical attributes like skin colour, while misogynists believe for equally primitive reasons that good behaviour is largely confined to the male sex, while bad behaviour is much more likely to be found among women.
In each case, the real world is completely the opposite from the results obtained when dominant groups of people flaunt their prejudiced points of view. Throughout history as well as nowadays, the number of people being severely mistreated for racist reasons runs into the hundreds of millions, while the number of women all over the world being severely mistreated by men is and was even larger. But the number of people being severely mistreated for elitist reasons is always the largest number of them all, since the poor and the powerless include people from both sexes as well as from every ethnic origin imaginable.
To be sure, it is also true that large numbers of individuals belonging to any of those more often targeted groups of people being mistreated are also quite capable of mistreating others. Women have faults and foibles just like men do, so they are not always being victimized by men, just a lot more often. Many of them also mistreat other women in various ways, or their own children, even sometimes victimizing the men that they know personally. Victims of racism in every part of the world are also quite capable of victimizing other people for their own equally prejudiced reasons. Nowadays, however, some anti-racist militants belonging to dominant ethnicities go overboard in trying to make up for the racist attitudes adopted by most of “their own people”, and end up idealizing people coming from victimized ethnicities instead.
As a result, these misguided people can become overly tolerant of criminal activity coming from those belonging to especially victimized ethnicities, even when the victims themselves are members of those same ethnic groups, as took place recently in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. In order to wage a bogus “fight against colonialism”, men from indigenous or other minority communities, who regularly commit major crimes against women, and other men, from their own ethnicity, are often not punished to nearly the same extent as are men coming from dominant ethnicities. But in spite of all those lesser aberrations, the main point here is that many more people, from each particularly victimized group, are nevertheless being mistreated by people from the dominant groups, a great deal more often.
In his book, Lowenthal also criticized the tendency among some of today’s ecology militants to project their own way of thinking onto hunter-gatherer populations that used to exist in the past, or that still exist in some parts of the world nowadays: “Current ecological pieties masquerade as indigenous tradition” (page 563). Most of the scorn that he put forward in his book, however, was directed instead at extremely rich and powerful people like Blankfein. He also ended his book by quoting (page 610) another eminent scholar, Walter Benjamin, back in 1936, who concluded one of his own books on the philosophy of history by pointing out that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Lowenthal himself, however, like many other “advanced liberal” thinkers, also supported the idea that civilizations in general have to adopt the commonwealth concept in order to function. According to this erroneous thesis, even though wealth and power in urban-based civilizations always seem to be concentrated among dominant social classes, in every culture and in every period of history, the people who run society still have to adhere to the commonwealth ideal, which means providing for everyone in each particular society, no matter how minimally. Such as in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example.
As Lowenthal saw it (page 605), the commonwealth concept has been developed by many leading philosophers, particularly in the Western tradition, from as far back as ancient Greece, and has been even further developed by such relatively recent contributors as Lord Acton (late nineteenth century) and John Rawls (1970s). It seems to me, however, that nineteenth-century economic liberalism, as well as today’s neoliberalism, also known as market liberalism, repudiate the commonwealth idea altogether, by promoting instead the severely intensified mistreatment of all the “inferior classes”. According to the market-liberal point of view, socially dominated people’s very existence has to be predicated on serving the “superior classes” in every possible way, either voluntarily or through militarily-imposed chattel slavery.
Which brings to mind “Managing for Dummies”, the 1996 book from the USA that I was referring to earlier in this blogpost, by Bob Nelson and Peter Economy. It is an extremely reactionary book, that reads as if it were produced by some kind of ultra-prejudiced algorithm. The authors are constantly harping on the need for the USA to survive threatening competition from abroad, while also avoiding any too-obvious return to the use of force, or to the kind of “tough guy management” that used to exist in days gone by (page 10), the goal always being to make sure that everyone at work does whatever is necessary to ensure successful profit maximization at all times, for every firm. According to them, the only way to do that in recent times is for the managers running the day-to-day operations of each private corporation to become totally focused on convincing everyone working for them to completely identify with each individual company, regardless of the section of the economy to which it belongs, or of what each corporation does to the people under its control.
Total identification with the goals set out by the owners of every private enterprise, regardless of how painfully stressful that may be to the workers involved (page 236), must be somehow inculcated in order to make sure that nothing, not higher wages and salaries, nor office politics, is ever allowed to get in the way of guaranteeing that each company makes a decent profit on every significant investment (page 272). Each manager therefore has the duty to convince each employee to love the firm as much as he (or she) does (page 243): “Wouldn’t it be nice if all your employees loved the organization as much as you do?”
In their book, the authors suggest hundreds of different ways by which individual workers can be “empowered”, at even the lowest levels, to love their firm more than they love themselves, or more than their own families, without the managers having to change any of those pre-existing levels in the process. The overall idea being to manipulate employees without appearing to be manipulating them, and to “harden attitudes” toward them while appearing to be doing exactly the opposite (page 333). Managers themselves can be motivated into producing such results only if they take advantage of every opportunity afforded by “office politics” to get ahead of everyone else and to climb the ladder rung by rung, from junior management to senior management, without worrying about hurting anyone else’s feelings along the way. Making the “transition” from worker to manager means making sure that every successful manager gets all the satisfaction possible from no longer belonging to the “inferior gangs” of ordinary employees (page 331).
From the 1980s through to the 2010s, this is precisely the kind of “lean” management that also led to millions of people being laid off because of the “just-in-time” rule, designed to ensure that every enterprise could “make do” with the least number of employees possible. Even in hospitals and schools, whether they belonged to the private sector or to the public sector, artificially-imposed quotas were foisted on nurses, orderlies, teachers and support staff, in the same way as they were imposed on industrial workers and grocery store employees.
With the onset of several succeeding pandemics, particularly the SARS-CoV-2 one that provoked the current, worldwide sanitary crisis (which is by no means over), and with limited access to union organizing or to genuine forms of social democracy, millions of people all over the world chose to react by joining “the great resignation” (constantly changing jobs), or by joining the parallel movement of “quiet quitting” (doing as little work as humanly possible). Which has led to the unprecedented phenomenon of a worldwide labour shortage, the number of jobs not being filled by anyone becoming equal to or greater than the number of officially unemployed people.
The world’s most powerful central banks, however, have just begun a new counter-attack that they again refer to as a “war on inflation”, similar to the one that was quite successful, back in the early 1980s, in confining all that inflation to the greatly-accelerated rate of profit introduced by neoliberalism. They targeted their interventions very well back then, making sure that most “ordinary people” (i. e., the working class) would be prevented from also benefiting very much from wage and salary inflation, following in the footsteps of all that profit inflation.
Just like the last time out, most of today’s inflation is coming from newly-inflated profits, and not just from financial corporations. During the first few years of the sanitary crisis, the world’s billionaires managed to increase the sum total of all their personal fortunes as much as they had done during the previous 23 years. In one year, they accumulated 3600 billion dollars more than they had stashed away before that time. (See the article by Jean-François Nadeau, “Défendre les minorités”, in “Le Devoir”, September 19, 2022.)
Unfortunately for the world’s less well-off people, they will not be allowed to catch up to that kind of profit inflation by enjoying wage and salary inflation to anywhere near the same extent. The most important central banks have set out once again to crush salary inflation, including such related attitudes as the “great resignation” and the “quiet quitting” movement, by creating another worldwide recession designed to scare the living daylights out of all the “ordinary people” in every country. Like last time, their goal will be to force all those “lesser” people to return to “voluntary” slavery once again by accepting any kind of job at all, even those offering very poor working conditions and very little remuneration whatsoever. Which, of course, is the way that such things are supposed to operate, according to all the world’s rich and powerful people. The very survival of “civilization” itself depends on their success.
In the long term, therefore, the ever-increasing division between the income levels of the world’s social classes has turned the merely theoretical existence of any kind of shared, or common, wealth into a sick joke. The dominant, worldwide assault on any form of genuine common cause, even among the officially “communist” countries, and even in the limited sense of positing the existence of a common wealth underlying every civilization, proves just how disturbingly untenable that particular concept has become. At the same time, the immense sums cynically spent on Elizabeth II’s funeral, in the midst of a general decline in popular income in the UK, were also accompanied by millions of positive references to the bogus British “Commonwealth” of Nations, which is just the UK’s way of maintaining a neocolonial presence among several dozen, severely mistreated former colonies, most of which are quite poor. As such, it is only another example of the many different ways by which the meaning of the commonwealth concept has strayed a very long way from what is was originally intended to mean.
Reading books that are as fascinating as Isenberg’s exceptional effort can not only help us get a much better understanding of US history than that attained when most people unthinkingly swallow the official version of events. It can also lead to getting a much better understanding of several other major sources of misery afflicting “ordinary” people not only in the USA, but also in the rest of the world. Some of those huge contemporary problems are of relatively recent origin, such as the rapidly accelerating climate crisis and the constant increase in the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons. Many of the other problems, however, such as ever-expanding class divisions, enormous population-reducing epidemics and devastating wars between competing empires, have been beleaguering humanity for quite a long time.
In recent times, every country and region in the world has been forced by its own ruling elites, as well as by the competitive pressure of surrounding empires, to submit to reactionary, dominant classes limiting social development in every part of the contemporary world. Just like they also did in the more distant past, in some cases even before the empires belonging to each region came to realize that the world was in fact a great deal larger than any of them had originally imagined.
As Isenberg also pointed out, back in the twentieth century, when the US rulers began proclaiming that their country had attained the “world’s highest standard of living”, the “poor white trash” phenomenon nevertheless prevented that country from becoming a great deal richer than it otherwise could have become, if it had followed a more social-democratic model of development, rather than putting the emphasis on rank individualism instead. As I contended earlier, what really sets the USA apart from any other elitist empire, ancient or modern, was the fact that it became the most successful empire in world history, not only in extracting wealth from its own downtrodden population, but also from a very large number of other economic satrapies spread out all over the neocolonial part of the world.
There are currently 196 officially recognized countries in today’s world, 193 of them belonging to the United Nations Organization, that are all presumed to be “independent” from each other. However, most of those countries are in fact economically dependent on a handful of dominant countries like the USA, that also happen to regularly interfere, sometimes quite violently, with their political independence as well. Which means that the official definition of what independence is supposed to mean is as remote from reality as are the similar pretensions according to which every social class, not just those very few people possessing a great deal of wealth and power, but also those possessing not much of anything, were all “created equal”.
In the real world, there is not now, nor has there ever been, any social equality anywhere, ever since social classes were first established. In a similar manner, there is no equality between nations in the geopolitical world and there never has been any of that kind of equality either. Even “middle-rank” countries, such as Spain, Canada, Australia, Morocco, South Africa, Pakistan or Indonesia, still throw their weight around as much as possible in their own vicinity. Everything going on in the real world does not function in the same way as it is supposed to function, according to any of the official mythologies.
The gap between myth and reality is even greater when it comes to somewhat more complicated situations, in which linguistic minorities suffer from the oppression of a linguistic majority, while at the same time also participating in simultaneously oppressing other, “shared”, ethnic minorities. This sort of division exists among many former colonies, such as Cameroon. In Canada, the country as a whole suffers a great deal under US imperial domination, but at the same time its English-speaking majority, of various different origins, dominates and oppresses its French-speaking minority, also of varying origins, centred in the province of Québec. Both of those linguistic communities, however, are also dominated by people of European origin, who “share” in the domination of dozens of minority indigenous populations, no matter what language they speak, as well as in “racially” mistreating dozens of other, non-European-origin, minority populations having immigrated over the years from abroad.
Over the past several decades, the federal government of Canada has officially imposed a policy of what is supposed to be “multiculturalism”, pretending to support equality among all the diverse populations living in that country. Curiously, however, Canada’s number one minority group, the largely French-speaking population of Québec, is not included in the official list of multicultural entities. A fake version of multiculturalism is instead used as a weapon to keep the largest minority group in its allotted, subordinated place.
This policy was adopted about forty years years ago in order to destroy the once-popular independence movement in Québec and has succeeded quite well in containing that movement, which is considerably less popular now than it used to be. The ultimate goal of that federal strategy has always been to reinforce the decline of the francophone populations in Canada, not only in Québec but also in every other part of Canada, in order to eventually eliminate the speaking of the French language throughout North America. A goal that currently seems to be much closer to success than it ever used to be in the past, especially among young Québec francophones nowadays, many of whom now speak English even among themselves.
Getting back now to the 2022 book by Alain Deneault, that I mentioned earlier in this blogpost, it has to do with all the curious ways by which left-wing (“cannibal”) mores and right-wing (“vandal”) mores differ from each other, while simultaneously resembling each other anyway. On the presumably left-wing side, for example, he criticized people belonging to the current transgender movement that was similar to my own treatment of it, by pointing out several different ways (page 29) by which transgender people of male origin often end up mistreating women in the same anti-feminist fashion as do many “straight” people, who themselves much more often mistreat everyone in the LGBT movement, in their own peculiar fashion.
On the right-wing side of things, Deneault also denounced the attitude taken by Mathieu Boch-Côté, a well-known, reactionary intellectual from Québec currently spreading most of his poison in France. Back in 2019, Boch-Côté apparently called Deneault a “fascist” in one of his own writings because Deneault had dared to declare that the real world has the capacity to upset strictly intellectual considerations and even to change them completely (page 210), another one of his contributions with which I agree completely. So far as I am concerned, Deneault could also have referred to certain transgender people as an example of how the real world can have a major effect on “intellectual considerations”, by pointing out that it is currently impossible for modern medical science to get anywhere near transforming a human body born male into a fully functioning female, or vice versa.
Deneault also denounced in no uncertain terms the reactionary concept of neoliberalism (or market-liberalism) dozens of times in his book, as when he focused (page 222) on how the legal concept of a “juridical person” (“personne morale”), has long been granted to every corporation, thereby giving every private company an advantage over most of their inferior, real-human adversaries in thousands of different ways. According to Deneault, that juridical concept has been used much more often since “psychopathic” neoliberalism (page 222) took over than it had ever been used in the past.
He similarly lambasted the newer forms of market-liberal theory according to which all subordinates have to be convinced to identify themselves completely with the management structure that oppresses them (page 238). The kinds of voluntary slavery that are constantly being imposed on its very numerous victims have become a variety of pro-fascist behaviour, hidden behind private-capitalist propaganda to the same ridiculous extent that the aging chieftains of the moribund USSR, back in the 1980s, continued to describe their own state-capitalist empire as a “workers paradise” (page 258).
I cannot agree, however, with some of the other things that Deneault was writing about in his book, particularly when he cited certain “discordant voices” (pages 152-155), questioning the universal validity of using vaccines against the coronavirus. In my opinion, the discovery and development of the mRNA vaccines by enormous private corporations like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have been quite useful in fighting against SARS-CoV-2, at least in those countries rich enough to have succeeded in buying huge quantities of those vaccines for their respective populations. Deneault seems to have been distracted by the fact that companies like Pfizer, having already become “compulsive liars” over the past several decades, also profited immensely from tax evasion on a gigantic scale (page 164). These accusations are quite accurate and have been extensively documented by many other sources. In my opinion, however, those disgusting practices do not take away from the fact that the vaccines themselves have turned out to be a major contribution to human health, if only in the world’s richest countries.
I also disagree somewhat with Deneault’s comment about how scientific praxis nowadays can essentially be summed up as a form of positivism serving the interests of large industrial firms and high finance (page 207). In this instance, Deneault’s analysis seems quite similar to some of the faulty reasoning committed in the German book that I mentioned earlier in this blogpost, the 2019 publication (English translation, 2021), “A short history of humanity: A new history of old Europe”, by scientist Johannes Krause and his journalist collaborator, Thomas Trappe. It was largely about some of Krause’s discoveries, who has become well-known in the field of archaeo-genetics, meaning basic research using recently discovered genetic evidence from the distant past, and applying completely unprecedented techniques of DNA reconstruction, in order to develop astonishing new theories of human genetic origins and cultural patterns. Although that research is largely based on European sources of DNA, it has uncovered several significant discoveries also implicating some of the people living in Asia, in Africa and even in the pre-Colombian “New World”.
It is not my purpose in this text to focus intently on the specific discoveries that Krause, his team and several other teams also working in the same field, have been making over the past several years. Suffice it to say that while researching the origins of the Neanderthal genome, by applying DNA techniques to genetic samples coming from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, Krause and his team seem to have been instrumental in discovering instead a whole new group of hominids known as the Denisovans (page 11). Which is an amazing discovery all by itself!
The same team, however, has also come up with a whole lot of other, almost equally intriguing discoveries, that seem to point to the existence of genetic links between humans living eons ago in that same Central Asian area, and large clusters of genetically-linked people who later migrated westwards into Europe, at about the same time that many others from the same group instead migrated east across Siberia and into the Americas. This series of migrations apparently occurred a very long time before the much more recent arrival of the people that pre-DNA researchers originally assumed to have been the very first group of people to have arrived in the Americas, via the Bering Strait, only a few thousand years ago (page 30). If this is true, as Krause contends, it means that today’s indigenous Americans, invaded much more recently by a second wave of European colonizers, share a significant part of their own genetic matter with those very same colonizers (pages 98 and 101)! It seems to me that this would not be very welcome news for at least some of today’s anti-colonial, indigenous militants, many of whom seem to believe that they have always lived where they live now, and never came from anywhere else at all.
The general thrust of this fascinating book turns out to be that human beings and their hominid predecessors have been moving back and forth all the time, all over the globe, with the result that constant migration has been the most important feature of human development since the very beginning. As the authors underline in their book, this certainly gives the lie to Nazi propaganda from the past, according to which each specific group of people, or “Volk”, developed their own distinct characteristics a very long time ago, that were quite different from the competing characteristics of every other “Volk”, none of those characteristics ever changing much over time (page 109). Which confirms my own take on this issue, according to which none of the separately identifiable groups of human beings on this planet, including all the indigenous peoples, remained precisely the same since they started out. All of them have been influenced back and forth by “foreign” groups at each stage of their existence.
In their book, Krause and Trappe also refer to the widely-disseminated theory positing the existence of an Indo-European family of languages (page 123), lying behind the emergence of such highly successful European languages as English, French, Spanish and German, but also to such related languages as Persian and Hindi. In Nazi ideology, this similarity was used to bolster the myth of “Aryan” domination, a word that also turns up in today’s “Iran”, the contemporary term for Persia. Krause and Trappe, however, quite correctly denounced Arian racism as well, explaining instead that the modern, extremely violent, European conquest of many different colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas accounts for the relatively recent extension of the widespread use of such Indo-European languages into those parts of the world (page 135).
A large part of their book also concentrates on the numerous linkages to be made between archaeo-genetics and the enormous influence of epidemics on human history, from the very beginning to the present day. Their theory according to which people from Central Asia may have colonized both Europe and the Americas a very long time ago, for example, may also have been linked to the plagues that apparently decimated both Europe and Central Asia during that same period (page 169). They also posit a link between the very large number of deaths caused by plague during the first 100 years of modern European colonization of the Americas and the relative ease with which those colonists managed to triumph against native-American resistance (pages 197-198).
However, in spite of all those contributions to science, including quite a few more potential discoveries than the ones to which I referred above, I get the impression that Krause and Trappe often tend to make conclusions inconsistent with the available evidence, from within the scientific community. In so doing, they resemble the somewhat similar conclusions that Deneault came to in his philosophical analysis of the necessary links between science and modern capitalism, that I mentioned earlier. I also cannot agree, for example, with one of Krause and Trappe’s introductory statements according to which in “the present day, we are on the verge of taking evolution into our own hands” (page x). In my view, that conclusion is not at all obvious, and reflects an ultra-voluntarist, trans-humanist bias. I do not feel that the evidence provided in their book necessarily leads up to such an astonishing claim.
Krause and Trappe also seem to believe that humanity these days is doing quite well, in spite of the enormous recent rise in world population (from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 8 billion nowadays), because “prosperity is still on the rise across the globe, while world hunger, rates of deadly diseases, and maternal and infant mortality—to mention only a few factors—are dropping” (page 236). All this in spite of the more challenging realities, mentioned on the same page, about the need for increased resources because of population growth, the existence of huge quantities of greenhouse gases provoking climate change, and the fact that “large numbers of people are competing for rapidly dwindling opportunities for growth” in many different regions of the globe.
It may of course be true that Krause and Trappe held those views in 2019, when their book was first published in Germany, before the English translation of it appeared in 2021, and would not necessarily come to the same overwrought conclusions nowadays. For one thing, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic did not officially start until December, 2019, when the leaders of the People’s Republic of China first informed the rest of the world about “COVID-19”, which in fact seems to have started out in that country several months earlier, and had already breached the PRC’s borders before December. It is much less likely that any well-informed observers would still put the emphasis in their overall evaluation of the human condition nowadays, on the onward march of human progress.
Krause and Trappe may also agree, however, with Deneault’s comments about the necessary links between current science and private capitalism. One of the most important problems that most scientists nowadays are having is in their constant search for funding, to pay for their very expensive research projects. Recent funding seems to be increasingly limited to dependence on huge private sources of capital, such as the Pfizer corporation, or on the equally huge sources of capital also available from state-capitalism. One example of the latter source was provided in their book when they referred to one of Krause’s colleagues receiving considerable help from the US Department of Defence, by winning an “Algorithm Challenge”, sponsored by the Pentagon back in 2012, complete with a one million dollar cash prize (page 167), as part of an effort to become better prepared for biological warfare.
It is certainly true that military spending has long been a major source of funding for scientific research, one of the most interesting examples of which being the initial development of the Internet by the same Pentagon. This is also an excellent example of the dependence of many other researchers, in the field of what used to be called “cybernetics”, on the enormous sums currently being spent by huge corporations like the GAFAM complex in that same country. Dozens of other countries all over the world also compete with the USA in spending on scientific research, from within their own government bureaucracies as well as from within their own private-capitalist bureaucracies. So Deneault’s analysis was not entirely off the mark.
However, it seems to me that one of the main “contributions” of the current sanitary crisis to humanity has been to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that neither governments nor huge corporations can ever be relied upon to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”, concerning strictly scientific interpretations of reality. Limiting the purchase of up-to-date vaccines to the world’s richest countries, letting “in-between” countries like China, Russia and India use their own, less effective vaccines instead, and refusing to properly fund the world’s poorest countries so that they too can adequately protect their own populations, seems to me to be asking for trouble. The only way to fight against an obviously global pandemic is to protect the entire world population equally, in order to curtail the potential rise of dangerous mutations.
What we need most these days is a great deal more emphasis on global cooperation, from a social rather than from a commercial standpoint, and the development of a functioning, worldwide commonwealth that will adopt a genuinely progressive program based on replacing the neoliberal fetich on short-term profit maximization with the development of a much less egotistical, all-inclusive, circular economy instead, in every country. It seems to me, however, that that kind of program is most definitely not very popular nowadays, among most of the world’s important decision-makers, as well as being total anathema to the hundreds of millions of misled people foolishly supporting ultra-right-wing populist movements.
My own investigations into the nature of ultra-right populism have convinced me that such movements are totally opposed to relying on scientific evidence for any purpose whatsoever, even less so than most governments or corporations. Which is precisely why they are so important in the overall neoliberal-neofascist strategy for world domination. The fact that such movements have become extremely powerful nowadays, everywhere on this planet, does not make the world a better place for science than if those organizations were not so powerful, quite the contrary.
At the present time, the human race has entered into an extremely difficult period of history, which could lead to the premature extinction of every last one of us, in spite of our still being able (just barely, for the moment), to prevent the return of mega-death on an unprecedented scale. In order to survive beyond the next fifty years, we need to be working together on a global scale to completely change our attitudes toward just about everything, jettisoning right away every policy the least bit related to either neoliberalism, neofascism, or both of them together. The fact that we are not doing very much of that at all, but are still mainly doing the exact opposite instead, should not be making any of us the least bit optimistic about the future.
Another really major source of current pessimism is the fact that no one seems to be doing anything whatsoever in order to put an end to all ongoing wars right away. Vladimir Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine is easily the worst news we humans have had to put up with for quite a long time. His attempt to force the incorporation into the Russian Federation, of sections of the Ukraine harbouring large numbers of Russian-speaking people, is the worst possible way of dealing with the existence of a national minority living inside a neighbouring country. Such situations exist all over the world and should never be resolved in such a debilitating fashion.
Russia and Ukraine should instead be capable of negotiating a treaty in which the autonomy of such regions could be guaranteed without resorting to military force. The US-dominated NATO alliance should never have given a hyper-reactionary like Putin the excuse that he needed by trying to surround Russia with hostile forces. Ukraine possesses its own ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) organization, the “super-hero” Azov battalion, but as far as I can tell since the invasion began, Russia is now acting in a much more neofascist fashion than what most Ukrainians have been doing to defend their territorial integrity. Worse still, Putin now seems to be getting ready to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in order to counter-act the demoralizing effect of recent battlefield defeats using only conventional weapons. The day that he decides to do that, we will not have to worry any more about the deleterious effect of climate change on our food supply, nor about any of the other huge problems that I have mentioned in this blogpost.
All the other wars still raging in other parts of the world should also be ended as well, such as the totally reactionary Saudi Arabia/UAE invasion of Yemen and its famine-inducing war with the Houthi rebels, backed up indirectly by Iran. All the other armed conflicts in and around such countries as Syria, Mali, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and so on, should also be resolved in a peaceful fashion, right away. Instead, we should be concentrating all our efforts right now on dealing with all the other threats to our continued existence, especially climate change caused mainly by the enormous accumulation of greenhouse gases coming from an overwhelming worldwide reliance on fossil fuels, even more in war-time than in peacetime. This is particularly true when we realize the extent to which every one of the world’s geopolitical confrontations are so closely linked with world poverty, with neoliberal-multinational reliance on the extraction of natural resources, with rich countries dominating poor countries economically as well as politically, and with the richer regions within each state dominating the poorer regions.
If nothing happens within the next few years to change all that, John Maynard Keynes favourite joke, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead” will be needing a new time frame. Because there no longer seems to be any long run. These days, only people who are already old can reasonably expect to die of old age later on. Which may go a long way toward explaining why so many younger people seem so fond these days of accusing all the world’s “baby boomers” of “causing” all their existential problems. They refuse to distinguish between the guilty boomers and the innocent boomers, just like all the other prejudiced people that I have enjoyed denouncing in this blogpost.
