Regression trumps Progress

The signs of regression are all around us nowadays. In North Africa and Western Asia, recent attempts at imitating liberal democracy, not to mention the nationalist and communist movements of previous decades, are all moribund. In their place is the current epidemic of hyper-reactionary Islamic fascism, rapidly overtaking all those countries not provident enough to have organized a return to a somewhat less disgusting military dictatorship. To be sure, this medieval Islamic atavism is not confined to the Middle East, nor even to the Muslim world in general, but has also followed migrant populations into the more accommodating sections of Europe, North America and several other regions. The ultra-Islamic contagion is helping to turn back the clock several centuries not only for moderate Muslims but also for all the other inhabitants of the infected regions. Promoted for decades by Western empires and their ultra-conservative Middle Eastern allies, as a useful weapon against nationalism and communism, primal Islam has now become those empires well-deserved nemesis.

Unfortunately, this particular disease is only the most virulent strain of world-wide religious regression, that has also broken out inside the Hindu-nationalist movement, in India and in the Hindu diaspora, to say nothing of militant Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist revivals affecting various parts of Eastern Asia and other emigrant communities elsewhere. Not to be outdone, the world’s most popular religion has also exported its own antediluvian versions of Christian fundamentalism and Bible-thumping literalism, infecting dozens of other countries. Based especially in the USA, this particular form of regression also spawned the increasingly popular Christian-Zionist movement, in alliance with the militant leaders of today’s Israel, in which liberal democracy and social-democracy have been recently replaced with a Talmudic fixation on the ultra-orthodox colonization movement.

As has become common with all these religious resurrections, microbial elements of neolithic belief in tribalism, sorcery and magic have also been mixed into the overall pandemic, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in the imperfectly modernized Western world. Nomadic mythologies, both Aryan and non-Aryan, are being combined once again with neofascist miscegenations of the Christian narrative, just like they were back in the 1920s and the 1930s. Native peoples in Canada, the USA, Australia and several other countries have also had to cope with a similar outbreak of borderline identity disorder, also focused on pre-urban traditionalism.

Another major source of modern regression is the enormous income gap between the social classes, that has been increasing at an alarming rate ever since the libertarian infection also broke out some thirty-five years ago. As a result, the top one percent of one percent, about one ten-thousandth of the world’s total population, has been taking an exponentially larger share of world income than it held during the somewhat healthier thirty-four years that followed the Second World War.

In spite of relatively modest gains in income that accompanied the recent industrialization of several previously peasant economies, the overall social bill of health  of today’s world has been severely infected by an unprecedented dichotomy between billions of underpaid industrial and service workers (more numerous than they ever were before) and a handful of ultra-rich financiers. The middle class that is supposed to preserve social well-being by separating the two extremes is gradually being killed off altogether, as every country in the world competes against every other country to reduce taxes further than ever before on parasitical nodules of potential investors. But only a very few of those hyper-concentrated pools of capital are still interested in any kind of job-creating productive investment, in which the rate of return is so very much smaller than in the pestiferous, exclusively financial transactions that dominate the current world economy.

The world’s richest people, not only those hailing from private-sector financial conglomerates but also those other billionaires who have taken over direct control of nationalized economies, are also trying to eliminate whatever remains of the much maligned twentieth-century welfare state. All over the world, every social program originally designed to help underprivileged people stay afloat at least minimally is being re-engineered so as to transfer less and less real income to such unworthy “useless eaters”. Today’s libertarian survivalists are trying once again to spin survival of the fittest into the epitome of a primitively democratic way of life, each individual guaranteeing each other individual’s personal freedom to compete in a fight to the finish for each and every place in the sun.

Still another affection undermining physical and mental health in today’s world is the incredibly short-sighted but quite popular tendency among decision makers to completely ignore ecological disorders. In spite of overwhelming evidence and daily reminders in all the media, both private and public investors all over the world are constantly pressing ahead with full-scale development of every kind of material pollution. They do this all the time in the most deliberately profitable ways possible, constantly inventing new excuses for doing nothing real to prevent environmental degradation. On the contrary, they consciously pretend that their ways of doing things are in fact ecologically preferable to any of the alternative methods available.

Canada’s Conservative government, controlled by people from the extractive industries, has become a world leader in pollution denial since it came to power back in 2006. They pay the inevitable lip-service to environmental protection, while carefully avoiding any decision that might in fact negatively affect investors sacrosanct bottom lines. Even the explosion of non-regulated petroleum tank cars, that killed dozens of people in Quebec last year, has not done anything to temper their enthusiasm for immediate profit. They have deliberately refused to take any blame whatsoever for what happened, just like they did during the poisoned food scandal in Ontario in 2008. All libertarians all over the world, in both the private and the public sectors, always blame every “isolated incident” of criminal negligence on the workers who carried out their orders and never on the bosses who made those decisions.

Every one of those seemingly separate outbreaks of reactionary behavior is in fact interacting with each other kind of atavism to create a world-wide pandemic of regression. Religious fanaticism, tribalism, social Darwinism and ecological blindness are like four separate strains of infectious disease combining together to bring down progress, rather like the famines in the early part of the fourteenth century that made it possible for the Eurasian plagues to kill millions more people than such epidemics managed to do prior to that time. As a result, all the material and intellectual progress of the succeeding six centuries risks being turned into its exact opposite in the foreseeable future.

During the European renaissance of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a small group of intellectuals started believing in progress, the idea that human beings and their societies were not trapped in any kind of apocalyptic or cyclical prison, but could in fact gradually improve themselves, both individually and collectively. This belief in human progress, originally rooted in the religious concept of the divine spark, led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which Christian anthropomorphism was abandoned by leading thinkers in favor of natural explanations of the universe. Human intellectual development as a concept took on a decidedly secular connotation during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when many thinkers came up with considerably more radical interpretations of what progress should entail. French philosopher Denis Diderot, for example, famously avowed that the world could only progress once the world’s last king was strangled in the entrails of the world’s last priest.

The industrial revolution in the West, between 1780 and 1880, considerably strengthened this idea of progress by giving it a much more solid grounding in productive economic growth, greatly increasing the potentiality for a much richer kind of commonwealth. The scientific progress preceding and accompanying that economic and social revolution then continued to expand and deepen its effect during what have sometimes been called the second (1880-1930) and third (1940-1980) industrial revolutions, which were in reality conceptual and technological extensions of the first one.

The idea of progress both caused, and benefited greatly from, all the amazing discoveries and innovations that constituted the truly positive aspects of rapid economic growth. Political and social reformists and revolutionaries all over the world then started to tackle the more negative aspects of industrial development by trying to extend the benefits of massively increased material wealth to all the different human populations that were initially ignored or horribly exploited by the pioneering entrepreneurs who managed to turn scientific and technological progress to their own exclusive advantage.

Although the train of human thought has never followed a strictly linear path, it nevertheless soon became obvious to people possessing a progressive frame of mind that leaving behind a belief in magic or in equally mythical religious constructions eventually led to several other logical conclusions. The first such conclusion had to do with the extension of the word “revolution” from its initial appearance in the science of astronomy to its eventual use as a political construct. To put it as simply as possible, using the most well-known example, the revolution of the planets around the sun was found to follow an elliptic curve rather than a pure circle, an idea (among many others) that was rejected by the scholastic leaders of the Catholic Church. For them, individual human behavior on earth could certainly be imperfect but not the actions of their universal God, who would necessarily have made heavenly objects follow a perfect pattern (a circle).

This led the followers of science and secular reality to the conclusion that since inanimate, celestial bodies could behave in such an “imperfect” way, there was no reason at all to continue believing in any of the human social constructs that had been invented over the centuries to justify enormous differences in power and income. In the absence of extra-terrestrial control, if the physical universe was not at all perfect, eternal or unchanging, then human societies did not have to follow any preconceived notions like the totalitarian domination of universal religions, the divine right of kings, or any other such malarkey. Subsequent observers have extended the same train of thought into the rejection of dozens of more recent ideological constructs, such as the free market.

As a result, the concept of progress soon came to include the extension of civil rights to everyone, not just the white male owners of property who originally invented free assembly, freedom of speech and the right to vote as weapons in their fight against the absolute monarchy. This meant liberating women, the other half of humanity, from 6000 years of religious and civic oppression within all the world’s urban-based empires. It also meant freeing hundreds of oppressed peoples in the colonies and economic satrapies of those empires, not to mention minority populations living inside the imperialist “mother countries”.

Recently, however, progress as a concept has been deliberately maligned and manipulated by sycophantic reductionists to mean the opposite of what it was originally supposed to mean. Radical ecologists, for example, have been denouncing “progress” as a synonym for environmental destruction. Multiculturalists have been just as busy rewriting the definition of the right to practice some particular religion as an excuse for doing away with such inconvenient, competing rights as women’s liberation, or taking away children’s rights to a decent education by allowing religious maniacs to confine education to purely religious fantasies.

But ecology is in reality an integral part of progress, since it means making sure that economic expansion really does provide increased prosperity for everyone. Unsustainable development can never guarantee progress for the rather obvious reason that short-sighted, linear expansion will simply collapse as soon as massive dollops of pollution eliminate the human populations totally dependent on breathing, eating and drinking non-poisonous elements in order to survive. Anyone who accuses progress of being anti-environment has obviously not thought much about what the word “progress” is supposed to mean. Ecological fascists should go back and read their dictionaries one more time.

Human rights are also an integral part of progress, as long as exclusively religious rights are not allowed to drown out all the other rights. The right to practice a religion, after all, is a personal choice, not a social one. Modern societies mixing together hundreds of different peoples, believing in thousands of different combinations and permutations of magic and sorcery, competing religious constructs, and primitive forms of ethnic identity, all jumbled up together, cannot possibly be expected to survive if every little group of believers is allowed to reduce everyone else’s rights to fit their own mythical projections. In a world of over seven billion globalized people, universal rights have to take precedence over letting each individual ego make up its own little package of personal behavioral quirks that everyone else has to accommodate because they are supposed to be so much more “authentic” than any other people’s beliefs.

There is also nothing racist about rejecting any of these reconstructed religious fantasies. In the first place, none of these modern egotistical projections of ancient religious practices are historically or theologically accurate reconstitutions: they all combine certain poorly understood ideas that their founders initially had, while rejecting others just as important, and adding all sorts of newer ideas in which none of the founders ever believed. In the second place, these reconstructions are not confined to any particular religious or cultural tradition.

Most importantly of all, it is completely ridiculous for politically correct sycophants to try to compel everyone to accommodate each and every one of these modern religious reconfigurations out of a misconceived fear of committing racism. Racism, after all, does not just mean negative discrimination against some particular cultural entity, it also includes positive discrimination for any particular group. Any form of discrimination on racial, cultural or ethnic grounds is racism; ordinary racism also includes reverse racism.

Evil things that people from dominated, minority groups do are just as evil as equivalent things that people from dominant, majority groups do. Evil people are not better if they come from Palestine rather than from Israel, or from China rather than from the USA, or from native people rather from non-native people. Equal doses of evil are equal, no matter from which human population they stem.

And finally, ego projection, otherwise known as hubris or overweening pride, is the root element of each one of those different forms of reactionary regression. People who believe in magic or similar religious myths are, after all, only projecting their own egotistical refusal to acknowledge that human beings are just another part of the natural universe. Humans in fact do not have any special right to be protected from the consequences of their own childish behavior by any genie, metaphysical father figure or harmonic principle possessing absolute control over everything that exists. Without an adult sense of responsibility for their actions, humans cannot expect “something else” to step in to save them from their own misdeeds. Unfortunately for more modern minds, the indifference of the rest of the universe to human problems and inadequacies is not something that over-inflated religious egos have the courage to accept.

Hubris is also the psychological principle underlying the individualist or antisocial form of egotistical behavior. Those who favor massive increases in the income gap between the social classes are into that sort of thing not so much for material benefit as such, since there are only so many particular items that any one individual can possibly use in a single lifetime. What they really seek is the kind of power over others that accumulating massive gobs of capital and outdoing everyone else on the planet appears to give them over every one of the supposedly inferior peons who surround them.

This is the same master and servant feeling of pure domination that also motivated, and still motivates, all the world’s totalitarian dictators, regardless of the imperialist, fascist, communist, populist or neoconservative ideology that they are nominally supposed to be representing. It is also not at all anomalous to note that many of the world’s most reactionary religious movements have made a very convenient pact with the devil by also upholding material accumulation, according to their favorite dictum, “God helps those who help themselves”.

This selfsame ego projection also explains deliberately ignorant attitudes toward environmental destruction. People who are constantly denying that any real ecological problems currently exist, or who profess to being able to find some kind of readily available technological fix for pollution and climate change, are simply letting their colossal egos get in the way of any real solution. While it is true that human beings are theoretically capable of solving those problems by simply discovering new kinds of natural resources that do not possess the same negative physical characteristics as those now being used, as in the controlled development of nuclear fusion, this can only happen if human societies possess the time, the audacity and the organizational will-power to effect such massive changes.

Unfortunately, there is nothing at all in the way human societies are currently being run that would suggest to any intelligent observer that progress is going to trump regression any time soon. Quite the contrary. Religious fanaticism, libertarianism and ecological blindness, all of them upheld by the kind of overweening pride that currently seems to have a death grip on the human race, make any kind of genuine progress highly improbable. It remains to be seen how this will all turn out, but at the moment the epidemic of unredeemable hubris looks unstoppable.

Corrupt Politicians and their Austerity Budgets

The recently elected Liberal government in Quebec came out with a new austerity budget that closely resembles many other such budgets adopted over the past several years in dozens of other places. This time around, it seems that the provincial government is serious about drastically reducing spending across the board, following the usual rhetoric about the need to eliminate annual deficits right away and therefore make it possible for Quebec to eventually pay off its accumulated debt. To reinforce their message, they have promised to pass new legislation this autumn so that they can roll back salaries and freeze hiring for all civil servants, not just for ordinary ministerial employees but also for everyone working indirectly for the government in the health and education para-public sectors, over half a million people all told.

These drastic, unprecedented cuts, as announced, go much further than any of the previous austerity budgets adopted in the past, since Quebec first hopped on the neoliberal bandwagon during the induced recession of the early 1980s. This latest version of fiscal rigor is being vigorously supported by the usual crowd of libertarian economists and media editorialists, all of whom emphasize how dangerous it is to continue borrowing money to  help pay for such “over-generous” social programs as public transit and daycare.

Spending middle-class taxpayers money on programs popular among middle-class taxpayers would seem like the right thing to do, given the fact that they pay a much larger percentage of tax than the rich do. But the antisocial fanatics always blame popular programs for causing every budget deficit and every debt burden ever created. They always treat every financial crisis caused in reality by the world’s richest investors as a given, as if it was completely impossible to control any of the incredible excesses of the world’s leading egomaniacs. Only social programs benefiting lesser folk, the non VIPs who do not make enough money to deserve deferential treatment, are singled out as the unique cause of every budget crisis the world has ever known.

It is as if the central banks monetarist interventions of the 1980s never existed, as if the world’s leading vulture capitalists never embarked on their speculative binge of strictly financial investment, as if the IT millennial crisis never took place, as if the 2007-2009 world financial collapse of the “too big to fail” never brought us all to the brink of disaster, as if none of the incredibly stupid decisions still being taken even more recently by the world’s most important financiers, had any impact whatsoever on government debt. According to all the mainstream economists and all the establishment editorialists, every single budget problem that ever surfaced anywhere is always and forever the fault of excessively demanding ordinary people, who insist on maintaining public health care and public education in spite of the “obvious need” that the experts feel for getting rid of that populist rubbish once and for all.

The Quebec government has already implemented the first phase of its legislative onslaught, by requiring current pensioners at the municipal level to contribute once again to previously negotiated pension funds, notably through de-indexing. Municipal unions are being targeted as the major obstacle toward eliminating the huge pension deficit, often on the grounds that younger workers are being made to pay for more numerous older workers. The other major argument for canceling collective agreements is that otherwise millions of people in the private sector who have no company pensions at all, or very inferior ones, would have to pay vastly increased municipal property taxes.     

Only a few analysts choose to remember, however, that it was the provincial governments, all across Canada, that decided twenty years ago to collectively transfer a large part of their responsibilities onto municipalities, suggesting that they pay for those greatly increased localized services by “temporarily” ignoring their pension liabilities. However, the provincial governments were themselves merely transferring part of the effect of the federal government’s own previous decision to download many of its responsibilities onto the provinces. And the federal government made that move during the 1990s because of the enormously increased federal debt caused by the monetarism of the 1980s, when the world’s central banks decided to solve the inflationary crisis of the 1970s by quadrupling interest rates. The Canadian government’s accumulated debt, from Confederation in 1867 right through to 1979, about 79 billion $ all told, was then astronomically increased in only fifteen years to over 500 billion $.

The 1970s inflation itself was caused by several different factors, such as the Vietnam War against communism and OPEC’s decision to greatly increase prices of petroleum exports. But a more important contribution to that crisis was the problem caused by the continued use of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, even after the USA had fallen way behind its post-war domination of world industrial production. An equally important cause of double-digit inflation during the 1970s was the refusal of many leading financiers, especially in the US, to sufficiently depreciate the monetary value of their by then technologically obsolete industrial investments.

In Canada, today’s federal debt is still almost as large as it was in the 1990s, in spite of all the transfers of responsibility to inferior levels of government, and all the accumulated debt-service charges paid since 1979. This is because of all the other financial boondoggles imposed by the world’s leading financiers since that time, especially the 2007-2009 financial meltdown. In fact, the Quebec government’s escalating assault on its own public sector is just a relatively small part of the entire world-wide transfer of responsibility for debt from the “too big to fail” private financiers who initially caused all those problems, to the ordinary people who always end up paying for financial hyper-profits, one way or the other.

Unfortunately, not much can probably be done to prevent libertarian governments from using ordinary taxpayers money to pay for rich people’s excesses. In the USA, the relatively small Tea Party rump seems to be controlling US politics altogether, to the astonished delight of its billionaire sponsors. Canada’s Conservative government is also hanging in there for privately sponsored neoliberalism in spite of its hundreds of political gaffes and its ongoing control of only about one-third of the total electorate.

The province of Quebec is another interesting case because voters here recently returned to power the anti-separatist Liberal Party. Curiously enough, the Liberals were  handily re-elected in spite of being singled out by the ongoing Charbonneau Commission into provincial and municipal corruption, as the major source of all that collusion. Quebec’s new premier, Philippe Couillard, is particularly poorly placed to lead a vigorous assault on public expenditure because of his past role as a non-performing business partner of Canada’s king of corruption himself, Dr. Arthur Porter. Porter at least symbolically brings the whole game together for not only having corrupted the McGill University Health Center and the Quebec government, but also for having “duped” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper into briefly appointing him to oversee the Canadian network of spy agencies.

Even though nothing has as yet been officially proved about the criminal guilt of any big-time political leader, the very idea that Couillard should become the guy running the most recent attack on the public sector is almost comically disturbing. The Quebec Liberals have zero credibility for this job since they were the ones most involved in encouraging construction companies to artificially inflate spending on public infrastructure in dozens of underhand ways. The private-sector friends of the provincial Liberal Party may not have had as much negative impact on Quebec government debt as did the much larger boondoggles of the world’s leading financiers over the past forty years. But it boggles the imagination to think that anyone could possibly rely on them to do anything to stop that kind of corruption. Like their Tea-Party cousins, the only thing that they are any good at is convincing middle-class people to pay for the bail-outs of the billionaire class.

Nationalist oligarchies

The recent coming-out of Pierre-Karl Péladeau as a Parti Québécois candidate in the current election campaign has made a lot of people in Quebec very happy, and a lot more people very upset. Péladeau is a media mogul based in Quebec, but with significant holdings in English Canada as well, who has become the only near billionaire to have so far declared his undying support for Quebec independence. As a result, the election campaign has focused on the constitutional issue once again, meaning that the current PQ attempt to form a majority government may have been sabotaged by the notoriously weak support for sovereignty even among the francophone Québécois.

In fact, people have known that Péladeau and his deceased father, the founder of the Québecor media dynasty, were Quebec separatists for quite a long time. But this is the first time that any ultra-rich oligarch has ever come out openly for sovereignty, which raises a lot of questions about the limitations that could be put upon such a person if ever he became a minister in the Quebec government or even, one day, the provincial premier. Those same questions may also become a lot more important even later on if Péladeau’s option ever wins a future referendum and he becomes a minister, or even the president, of an independent republic.

All the turmoil caused by Péladeau’s recent announcement, however, should be tempered by the fact that the Quebec independence movement has never really been about complete separation from Canada. Because of the large anglophone minority in Quebec, and the now equally large allophone community, it would take about 65% support for Quebec sovereignty among the francophone population just to achieve 50% plus one vote in a general referendum. Since that type of support has never been achieved, the PQ has always had to scale back its objective to sovereignty-association, or hyphenated sovereignty, meaning that an economic association with English Canada has always been part of their message. No one really knows if English Canadians would ever envisage a merely economic association with Quebec, however, since the PQ did not win the two referendum campaigns already held, even though it came a lot closer in 1995 than it did in 1980.

Nationalist movements all over the world have always been based on the premise of national liberation from foreign control. By removing politically or economically oppressive foreign control over the nation’s vital forces, the argument is that independence will lead to a much better life for the majority of the population. All the social components of the nation are supposed to put aside their differences and pull together toward a common goal of national development, that becoming possible for the first time because the people are no longer oppressed or exploited by a foreign empire.  

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, English Canada also went through a national liberation phase of sorts, many people feeling that Canada as a whole had become nothing but a US satellite country, both politically and economically. Paradoxically, the Liberal governments back then that tried so hard to silence the Quebec separatists, were also the same governments that adopted economic nationalism to free the Canadian economy from US control, as well as taking decidedly anti-American stances in foreign policy. National liberation for Canada was supposed to have been focused in particular on ending the old reliance on exporting natural resources, in order to develop a more industrialized and therefore more independent nation.

On a world scale, however, the national liberation promise has been vehemently criticized over the last several decades because of the obvious failure of many liberated countries to achieve most of their goals. As a result, the majority of the people in most of those countries do not seem to be much better off now than they were before independence. National pride may have grown tremendously, but economic or social development has often lagged far behind. The national liberation of places like India, Algeria, or South Africa, for example, only seems to have replaced one group of foreign oppressors with a new group of national oppressors, the national bourgeoisie taking the place of the imperial bourgeoisie but refusing to pass on any of the liberating effects of independence to any of the socially inferior classes.

In many cases, colonialism has been replaced by neocolonialism, with the former empires abandoning outright political control but substituting arms-length economic control instead. The same multinational corporations from the same countries as before simply operate through the compradore bourgeoisie, which is to say local politicians and investors who take a small cut of the profits for themselves before transferring most of the loot to the real bosses in the former “mother country”, or some other foreign empire that has taken its place.

Putting those two situations together means that ordinary people all over the world are now being exploited by a combination of local and foreign big shots, the percentage of national or imperial control varying greatly from one place to another. The only element of the equation that has not changed at all is the way that the majority of the people are being treated. No national liberation at all for most of them, including in Canada, where a recent succession of mostly Conservative prime ministers have brought the country back into its old pattern of resource extraction for the benefit of foreign empires.

In the Quebec case, the sovereignty movement used to characterize the Canadian federation as nothing more than a political extension of the former British empire. One of the more radical members of that movement, Pierre Vallières, accused the Canadian sub-empire of treating the francophone Québécois like “white niggers of America”, exploiting them in the same way as the Black minority in the USA were being exploited by the White majority. Former Quebec premier René Lévesque also referred to rich English Canadian minority leaders within Quebec as “white Rhodesians”, who treated the French-speaking population in Quebec the same way that Ian Smith’s government (1965-1980) treated the Black majority in Zimbabwe.

All of this was initially based on the fact that Quebec used to be what Chicago sociologist Everett Hughes called a folk society, in which most of the employers were anglophones, while most of the industrial workers were francophones. That meant that for quite a long time the Québécois were indeed both politically and economically subordinate to the English-Canadian majority in the rest of Canada.

This neocolonial situation began to change, however, during the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s, when the provincial government began actively subsidizing the development of a much larger Québécois bourgeoisie than the one that used to exist for a century and a half before that. Francophone investors like Pierre Péladeau and his son, Pierre-Karl, started becoming a lot richer and a lot more powerful than their predecessors ever were in days gone by. Although anglophone investment in Quebec (from the USA, the UK, English Canada and the anglophone minority within Quebec) undoubtedly remained dominant, for the first time francophone Québécois investors became a significant minority in the overall community of big-time capitalists operating within that province. The folk society was kaput.

Back in 1987, I remember talking briefly to Pierre-Karl Péladeau when I was attending a conference on nationalism organized by a conservative magazine called L’Analyste. Much of the debate going on during that meeting concerned the influence of neoliberalism, that had just recently become a popular ideology after the election and re-election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I had published an article in that magazine claiming that the debate between which institution should control economic development, the state or private enterprise, was a false debate since no large modern economy seemed able to function properly without involving both of them. Right after that, I also published a two-part series in the same magazine about the history of economic nationalism in Quebec.

The Québecor empire went on to become a perfect example of a private enterprise profiting from state intervention, especially in 2000 when the Quebec government prevailed upon the Caisse de dépôt pension fund, to join with Péladeau to keep the Vidéotron cable network from falling into the hands of a rival, English-Canadian, media empire. More recently, Québecor has also profited from the Conservative federal government’s desire to help it become a major player on the much larger pan-Canadian media scene, in order to break up the current price-fixing oligopoly of three English-Canadian conglomerates.

Unfortunately, on a number of other fronts, Pierre-Karl Péladeau has adopted a much more neoliberal style than his father had developed initially. For one thing, Péladeau fils  became a case study in bad industrial relations, using lock-outs on 14 different occasions, not in order to reach any kind of compromise with the rambunctious unions within his sprawling empire, but to eliminate them altogether. He also managed to circumvent the Parti Québécois government’s anti-scab law during those conflicts and, more recently, seems to have prevailed upon the party to cancel a resolution that was to have become part of its electoral program, aimed at updating that law so as to include electronic media. The journalists association in Quebec is also upset at what they call Péladeau’s micro-management of his newspapers, according to them constantly intervening in editorial decisions in spite of the fact that he has always claimed to be against that sort of thing.

This has led a large number of critics to fear that if Péladeau gets elected, and becomes an important minister in the PQ government, he will use the same style of neoliberal management in whatever presumably economic portfolio he inherits. Critics are concerned that recruiting him right now fits in very well with the PQ’s drift to the right over the past few years. Instead of sticking with the interventionist, social-democratic, pro-union profile that used to characterize that party, the PQ seems intent nowadays on cozying up to the business class instead. Their drift to the right has notably included much lower taxes on mining companies than they used to advocate, as well as ignoring any environmental disasters that those companies leave behind. The PQ has also decided to play along with the federal government’s endorsement of importing petroleum into Quebec from the Alberta tar sands, another policy area in which they are now advocating what they used to oppose.

Those fears about Péladeau may turn out to be entirely justified. Someone who made a lot of money with the help of the government may one day turn against using state intervention for social programs. Most people with a neoliberal frame of mind think that Quebec spends far too much money on such things as health care, education, welfare and daycare, especially given the fact that the Quebec debt is already quite a bit higher than that of any of the other Canadian provinces. What happens when the provincial government, or  a future sovereign state, has to choose between helping Quebec businesses succeed against ferocious competition from outside Quebec, or continue developing social democracy for the rest of the population?

Even more importantly, what happens to the whole national liberation movement within Quebec if its leaders adopt exactly the same pro-business, libertarian stance that every other government in the world has already endorsed? If the only people who get liberated are the billionaires, why should the rest of the population go along with the gag? If the Quebec population cannot afford social democracy any more, how can they afford to help their oligarchs compete against much richer countries, or against poorer countries using low production costs as a bargaining chip? The same question also applies to the Canadian government as well.

In today’s world, the various national governments have to compete not so much with each other, but more importantly with the world’s most powerful banking corporations. Those people now spend most of the world’s available capital on several different kinds of speculation, but particularly on monetary speculation, which has increased 500 times over since 1970. Most of the government debt in today’s world comes from speculation rather than from social programs, as we all found out following the 2008 debacle. What kind of sovereignty, or independence, can countries have from each other, if all of them are totally dependent on geographically disembodied pools of capital for their survival? Even the USA is totally dependent on foreign bondholders who control most of its increasingly colossal debt. What does national liberation mean in a world like this?

Religious conspiracy theories

Those who follow any of the world’s media regularly are constantly being bombarded these days with dozens of comments about how stupid it is that so many people continue to believe in conspiracy theories. Without a doubt, most of those theories, like the one about how the Americans never really landed on the Moon after all, are completely bogus and were indeed invented by weak minded people to help them deal with the unbearable anxiety caused by not always having all the answers to every question. Other conspiracy theories, however, like the one about how President Aristide of Haiti was overthrown back in 2004 by a military conspiracy involving the USA, France and Canada, are most likely true, even if they have not so far been proved.

As I pointed out several years ago in one of my published books, real conspiracies have been happening throughout recorded history, not only in the political sphere of human discourse, but also in the economic, social and cultural spheres as well. Since the rise of capitalism, the most frequent conspiracies are the ones constantly being concocted by the world’s most important companies of investors, who are always trying to make more money than everyone else by keeping their various investment strategies a secret until it is too late for the competition to do anything to thwart them. Modern political ideologies like liberalism, nationalism and socialism have also created hundreds of their own conspiracy theories over the years, the libertarian conspiracies for running the world by doing away with the state altogether becoming a mirror image of totalitarian conspiracies aimed at abolishing the private sector instead.

But the conspiracy theory that I like the best is a lot older than those ones. This was the “Donation of Constantine”, a document written by the first Christian emperor of Rome that granted hegemony over all Christianity to the bishop of Rome, presumably starting with Saint Peter as the first pope and continuing right up until the Apocalypse. It was not until John Paul II’s reign that the Church officially admitted that the whole thing was based on a fake document written by Catholic monks during the Middle Ages, several centuries after Constantine’s death. It turns out that the first time that anyone really believed that the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head of the universal (catholic) church was when Gregory the First became pope towards the end of the sixth century, AD. In reality, the Christian emperors, from Theodosius I to the fall of Rome, adopted a form of imperial control over the Church (Caesaropapism), a practice continued later both within the Orthodox churches of the Byzantine and Russian empires, as well as the Anglican church of the British empire, but not at all by the theocratically inclined popes of the Catholic Church.

But anyone who thinks about such things from a social science point of view soon realizes that all religions are, in and of themselves, conspiracy theories on a gigantic scale. Fearful and anxious people have always tried to reassure themselves about the world that they live in by inventing all sorts of metaphysical or supernatural myths about creation, procreation, death and the end of the universe. This has been going on since our first Paleolithic ancestors tried to control their fear of the dark by creating belief in magic and the spirit world, as exemplified in the various kinds of prehistoric animism, shamanism and totemism. The somewhat newer, state-sponsored, official religions created since the rise of urban civilization 6000 years ago are simply more recent variations on a long-standing theme.

In all the official religions, the aristocratic founders of the state invented either polytheist pantheons of divinities, or a monotheist God with a human face, whose one common characteristic was to recognize the ruling aristocrats as the sons and daughters of the creator(s) of the universe. That way, any social upheaval among the inferior classes could be condemned as sacrilegious. Anthropomorphic surrogate parents dwelling in the sky (heavens) also helped reassure their earthly children that all was well and that the menacing manifestations of the natural world were nothing more than divine toys being manipulated in mysterious ways by their benevolent, immortal ancestors.

Later on, more enlightened human beings in various cultures began developing the rational view of the universe instead, attributing natural phenomena to natural causes and doing away with metaphysical explanations of reality altogether. Rational explanations, however, always seemed too cold and insufficiently nurturing to the fearful among us, who much preferred more comforting explanations of events. In recent times, even the compromises between science and religion adopted by more moderate believers were judged woefully inadequate by literal believers, who desperately needed a more fundamentalist version of the written word to deal with the nightmares caused by modern, urban living.

In today’s world, the rise of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish ultra orthodoxies, combined with a syncretic rise in belief in magic, threaten to forever eliminate science, the Enlightenment, critical thinking and, ultimately, technology itself. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are finding it exceedingly difficult to come to grips with all of their problems, because they are still reading (if at all) at a grade-school level in a world run by post-doctoral computer geeks and their high-financial employers. The fundamentalists absolute faith in heavenly intervention helps them deal with the fact that they do not stand a chance in today’s world, and leads them directly to their only alternative, which is to destroy today’s world completely and replace it with a return to antediluvian, old-time religion. Even if it means wiping out most of the world’s current population, which has become so pitifully dependent on more modern ways of thinking.

All the Muslim countries, as well as Muslim minorities in other parts of the world, have been particularly stricken by the fundamentalist disease, resulting in atavistic attacks on secular constitutions established during the twentieth century. As a result, the status of Muslim women is under worldwide attack, tribal customs and Islamic theology being combined to maintain or to reintroduce such abominations as excision, unpunished rape, forced marriages, cloister clothing and denial of access to basic education. But the fundamentalist epidemic has also broken out in Christian countries as well, exemplified by similar attacks on secular constitutions, women, gays and other minorities, not only in Africa and Latin America, but also in the USA and Europe. Hindu fundamentalists in India are set to take power again in that country, attacking women and gays as much as, or more than, any other fundamentalists, while pursuing their ongoing vendettas against any authors or publishers (such as Penguin India) who dare diffuse works that describe the mythological origins of Hindu divinities. Buddhist authorities in Burma (Myanmar) are also putting the lie once again to the myth of Buddhist pacifism in their ongoing treatment of Muslim minorities within that country. Israel is also under constant attack by its own ultra-Orthodox true-believers, even expelling one particular sect for its  outrageous treatment of women and children, the same sect going on to commit the same crimes in Quebec before doing it all over again in Ontario, and now moving on to Guatemala.

All over the world, fundamentalist organizations have succeeded in imbedding themselves within modern politics, taking power through theocratic revolution or through democratic election, whichever method works best in their own particular neighborhoods. In North America, they have taken over almost complete control of the Republican Party in the USA as well as the Conservative Party in Canada, but they also have strong constituencies within the other major parties. Their influence can be felt not only in domestic policy but also in foreign policy.

Israel, for example, practically owes its very existence not only to its own patriots but also to the ever-increasing numbers of Christian Zionists who back everything that the Israeli government does for their own peculiar reasons. They say that they like Israel because it is much more democratic than any of the other countries in the Middle East, forgetting what many Israeli scholars have already pointed out, that it is impossible for any state with an established religion to be genuinely democratic in any meaningful way. Israel’s ongoing successes in industry and its very large percentage of scientists within the overall population are also not the real reasons for their support of that country.

In reality, they like Israel because for literal interpreters of the Bible, the second coming of Jesus Christ cannot take place until Greater Israel has been firmly re-established within its entire Biblical territory. Nor does this mean that they particularly like the Jews themselves, since the Book of Revelations predicts that the Jews at Armageddon will be given one last chance to redeem themselves by converting to militant Christianity. Those who refuse to do so are slated to suffer torture for several hundred years during the Apocalypse, and eventually perish forever, along with every other kind of unbeliever in the world.

This may have been what was going on in the minds of Conservative true-believers in Canada recently, when leading ministers of their government compared Putin’s recent seizure of the Crimean peninsula with Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939. On the face of it, that comparison was not too outlandish since both the Germans and the Russians successfully conspired to occupy territory ostensibly to protect national minorities living inside Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine. Political opportunists in the USA may also have repeated the same comparison in order to help people there to forget recent American territorial conspiracies in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But for Christian Zionists that same comparison could be inspired by a subconscious desire on their part that the Russian occupation of the Crimea be soon followed by the outbreak of World War Three, just like the Sudetenland occupation was soon followed by the outbreak of the Second World War. That would certainly go a long way toward fulfilling one of the most important conspiracy theories originally written down in the Bible. If God and the Son of God do indeed exist, as good Christians so ardently believe, how could they ignore such a magnificent opportunity to establish the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven?

It would be nice to believe that even Christian fundamentalists could not possibly be thinking nowadays in such old-fashioned, apocalyptic terms, nor that they too could some day pull off such diabolical schemes as the one that their Islamic cousins committed in the USA back in 2001. But as long as conspiratorial religions keep on getting stronger and stronger, and rational methods of thinking keep on getting weaker and weaker, even crazier things than 9/11 may become increasingly possible. Those who still feel like reasonably accommodating the more exotic antics of the different kinds of true-believers these days would probably do well to re-read some of the most hair-raising sections of the world’s most sacred religious literature. There may very well be a few passages in those works that could lead to attempted wish fulfillment on the part of some of the more deranged conspiratorial minds among us.

I plead not guilty

It never ceases to amaze me how often I come across people who assume that because someone like me belongs to a designated group, that means that I and others like me must necessarily benefit from belonging to that group, or are necessarily guilty of all the alleged crimes committed by the selfsame group. These very peculiar people automatically assume that everyone in the reference group always participated fully in whatever collective activity that they wish to praise, or to denounce. Personally, however, I plead not guilty to dozens of presumably good or evil undertakings in which I did not participate at all.

The most obvious case has to do with my nationality. For as far back as I can remember, the fact that I was born in Canada, more specifically in English Canada, and spent almost my entire life here, in anglophone provinces or the anglophone part of Montreal, is somehow interpreted as proof that I did something, or refrained from doing something else, because of that. Patriotic English-Canadians, for example, often refer to how “we” beat the French-Canadians at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and therefore separatists nowadays should watch out lest “we” do the same thing all over again. Canadian nationalists also like to reminisce about how “we” won the War of 1812 against the USA, or the fact that “we” were on the winning side in the First and the Second World Wars, not to mention the cold war, and that therefore “we” are somehow better than the inferior people who were born in countries that were on the other side of the aforementioned conflicts.

The accident of birth in any country, however, has nothing whatever to do with personal participation, or even symbolic participation, in any historical event. In the first example, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was mostly fought by British and French regular troops rather than by any of the local Canadian militias, just like the War of 1812 was fought mostly by British and American regular troops, even if most of the action took place in Canada. The Seven Years War (1756-1763), fought simultaneously in Europe and in several colonies all over the world, included the 1759 British-French skirmish on the Plains of Abraham, just as the Napoleonic Wars of 1799-1815 included the War of 1812-1814 as a North American sideshow. The outcomes of both of those wars did not depend in any significant way on what the very few people who thought of themselves as Canadians did or did not do back then. Neither did Canadian participation in the major conflicts of the twentieth century change much so far as the overall results of those wars are concerned.

None of those confrontations were anything like the kinds of conflicts that most patriotic Canadians assume that they were. Just to give one example among dozens of others, during most of the Second World War, the liberal-democratic group of nations that presumably included Canada, was allied with one major totalitarian dictatorship (the USSR) against the Axis coalition of other totalitarian dictatorships. Moreover, the liberal-democratic nations participating in that war did not often act in what are assumed to be liberal-democratic ways nowadays. In Canada, the War Measures Act of 1914, re-adopted in 1939, turned this country into just another totalitarian state, democratic rights being explicitly suspended once again for the duration of the war.

An even more important realization, however, is the fact that every country in the world has changed enormously over the past centuries and even more rapidly in recent decades. The kind of people who lived in English Canada, or in francophone Quebec, or in the USA, or any other place, two hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, are not generally the kind of people who live here today. At the same time, significant minorities within those populations, long ago, more recently or nowadays, did not and do not think in the same ways that the majority of those same populations did then, or do now. People who assume that “we” won any battle or any war in the past, or participated in the same way in any other event over succeeding periods of time, are just creating fantasy worlds inside their own heads. In all those cases, the designated group known as “we” never really existed and does not exist right now either.

Moreover, significant minorities in every country in the world, including Canada and the USA, did not then and do not agree now with at least some of the decisions taken by their “leaders” over the years, not only on issues of war and peace but also concerning  every other sort of public policy. For example, during the world wars of the twentieth century, when the Canadian government insisted on conscription in order to provide sufficient cannon fodder for its army, this policy was opposed not only by the majority of the French-speaking population, but also by significant numbers of political radicals in English Canada, most of them from the left wing of the political spectrum. No country on Earth has ever presented a totally united front on any major issue.

Governments and political pundits, however, still insist all the time on including everyone in any given country whenever they talk about how “our nation did this” and “our nation decided that”. In fact, all that these sycophants are referring to in every case is some decision or another made exclusively by a very small number of people in power. Sometimes, those decisions did indeed reflect the general sentiment of a majority of the adult population, in most dictatorships as well as in most democracies, but quite often the leaders point of view was in at least partial contradiction with the majority sentiment, not to mention the fact that there always existed a significant minority opinion on every major issue.

This kind of thing is particularly evident when it comes to refuting assumptions about Western nations made by a lot of people from the Third World. Critics from Asia, Africa and Latin America often assume that everyone in the West always agrees with, and still profits from, every rotten action or policy carried out in the Third World during the colonial period of history, not to mention the neocolonialism that still exists nowadays. Activists in, or from, those places are constantly denouncing “the Western imperialists” or “the crusader states” for mistreating their peoples over the past few centuries, without taking the time to reflect on whether or not all the people of Western origins really supported, or profited from, any of the aforementioned policies.

In those cases when the majority of the people disagree with government policy, they are sometimes more conservative than the people in power, and sometimes more progressive. At all times, however, some of the people are always opposed to every policy, often for quite different reasons. It is therefore extremely disgusting, particularly for people like myself who have practically never agreed with any official decision on anything, that the pundits, the ideologues and the publicists always refer to the whole country when announcing any decision, rather than admitting that the number of people within the country who made that particular decision is always a very small minority. I get particularly incensed every time someone associates me with any particularly stupid decision taken by any Liberal or Conservative government of Canada, since I have never voted for, nor otherwise supported, either of those parties.

Another major objection to the all-inclusive way of thinking is the fact that hundreds of millions of people all over the world do not in fact have an accurate vision or knowledge of their own origins. In my case, I found out rather late in life that my family origins were not the ones that I thought I had during the first several decades of my existence. Not only were my ancestors not from the same families, in some cases they were not even from the same ethnic or linguistic groups, an observation that applies not only to my European ancestors but also to my Amerindian ancestors.

There were thousands of different reasons why people’s biological origins often differed greatly from what they were led to believe initially. Racism often had a lot to do with that. Over the centuries, people’s true origins were often hidden by their families in order to avoid the stigma attached to “inferior races” or to minority religions. Millions of individual family names were changed in the process, either partly or completely. Anyone with a good general understanding of world history soon realizes as well that the “races” considered “inferior”, or the religions considered anathema, were not always the same ones, from one part of the world to another, or from one period of history to another. Every identifiable group in history has suffered from some kind of exclusion or mistreatment at some point or another, even if certain groups ended up suffering a lot more than others.

As a result, practically every ethnic or religious origin in the human universe has in one place or another, at one time or another, been subjected to some kind of voluntary ignorance of its existence. Even in “pre-historic” tribal societies, millions of people have been inducted over the years into every tribal group who did not biologically belong to it at first. It is therefore impossible for anyone living nowadays to know for sure that he or she is really and truly of some “racially pure” ethnic origin, or some “completely pious” religious or ideological origin, for the simple reason that no such purity exists now, nor has it ever existed in the past. In today’s world, people who build their entire lives and identities around some particular kind of ethnic or spiritual origin, are just being ridiculous. No one alive today really knows for sure where and from what all his (or her) ancestors really came.

The same general kind of observations can be made about dozens of other presumed collectivities and not just about ethnicity or religion, nations or empires. I remember when I was going to high school during the 1960s and being encouraged to show a little “team spirit” toward  “our” local sporting associations. People from whatever local area were expected to support “their” teams, as they are still now, whether or not they particularly liked some of the jocks who dominated those teams, or some of the adults who ran them, or even some of the local mayors, who were not always the marvelous leaders that everyone was expected to pretend that they were.

Team spirit in sporting activities often also overlaps with ethnic chauvinism, such as during the Olympic Games, when “we” are supposed to support “our” athletes, whether they won or lost, not to mention whether they behaved well or poorly towards the host country. This problem is particularly evident in bicultural or multicultural places like Canada, because some people do not like identifying with certain athletes, if they are too “French” or too “English”, or too whatever. But racism or religious bias means that politically incorrect reactions to athletes or other heroes takes place all the time, and in every country.

Like everyone else, I also ran up against the same “team spirit” ideology many times during the 49 years I spent working for a living. Most private companies and public institutions adopt what are called loyalty pledges or mission statements that make it clear that everyone who works there has no choice but to support whatever its leaders support and to denounce whatever its leaders denounce. Nations, cities, towns, counties, corporations, schools, hospitals--all those institutions require every private or public employee to go along with the gag and to necessarily accept whatever the people in power want them to accept at any given time.

If they disagree in public with official institutional policy, they can lose their jobs, or their freedom, or even in extreme cases their lives. Personally, I can remember being made aware of dozens of different situations, in many of the places in which I worked, that I would like to have denounced directly to the media, but was prevented from so doing by forced loyalty. Many of the decisions taken by “our” leaders were completely bogus to me, particularly the many times when those leaders refused to do anything at all about poor working conditions, even though problems were frequently brought to their attention by the employees whenever they put everyone’s health and security in real danger.

Since I have lived all my life in a relatively democratic country, it is obvious because of everything that I have been pointing out, that the “democracy” everyone is supposed to enjoy so much, is not all that convincing. People who live in dictatorships have no freedom of speech whatever, but people who live in what we choose to call democracies do not have that many more real opportunities to convince “our” leaders that they should be working for all of us rather than just for some of them.

I have similar objections to comments I heard recently about how the baby-boomers ruined the natural environment when they were running the world, leaving more recent generations with a whole host of ecological problems. Once again, leave me out of the equation. In the first place, people alive now, of whatever generation, are still being influenced in all kinds of different ways by decisions taken by leaders who have been dead for decades, or even for centuries. As a group, today’s baby-boomers were not any more collectively responsible for the current ecological crisis than the soldiers in the trenches were responsible for the First World War.

As I pointed out earlier, the main reason why that is true is because the world’s major decisions are always taken by a very small proportion of the world’s population. Very few of the hundreds of millions of baby-boomers had the opportunity to participate in any of the important decisions leading toward today’s massive environmental degradation. As in similar social situations, such as the 2008 financial crisis, millions of people cannot realistically be expected to lay down their lives on the barricades every five or ten years, in the hope of creating some kind of successful revolution, whenever the big shots make some particularly odious decision. This is especially true because in the past the new gang of leaders who took over after most of the world’s successful revolutions always found a way to betray their disciples and to follow in the footsteps of the old gang of leaders, instead.

Nevertheless, it is true that millions of ordinary people do not go out of their way very often to oppose whatever rotten decisions their leaders are making. Large-scale complicity is a very real problem, even if most public opinion is being manipulated every day on an even more massive scale than it was in the past. In Canada, for example, the Harper government has been systematically doing whatever it could for the past several years to help the country’s major polluters greatly enhance their already enormous carbon footprints, without suffering any discernible loss of support from ordinary voters. People from the baby-boom generation certainly do have a tendency to drive their cars to and from work every day even when public transportation is readily available. But those of us older people who have been taking the subway to work, nine times out of ten, for the past several decades, are still tarred with the same brush as the owners of the tar sands.

Unfortunately, none of the problems enumerated above are ever likely to go away any time soon. Most people seem to truly enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, no matter what the consequences. The world’s conformist majority also loves to blame “everyone” for every problem, the better to deny any possibility that some people might in fact be a whole lot more guilty than others.

Voluntary slavery

Forty-nine years ago, I started my adult life as a wage slave, working for about a third of the total time in manual jobs, another third as a part-time teacher and a final third as a full-time teacher. For about half of that period, I was simultaneously involved in left-wing politics and read several thousand pages of text about the history of the labor movement since the nineteenth century. I even managed to contribute a few dozen more pages myself of published articles on the same subject. Nowadays, in preparation for retirement, I often reflect on the recent evolution of the class-based societies in which all human beings are obliged to live.

When I first started out back in 1965, most people in North America, Western Europe and Japan were industrial workers, slaving away five or six days a week to make their employers a lot richer than they would ever become themselves. A half century later, the bosses have transferred most of those factory jobs to newly industrialized parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where billions of low-cost laborers are doing their best to keep nineteenth century British economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” fully operational. Which means that most of them are still being paid only a few dollars per year more than what is biologically necessary to keep them alive and reproducing.

In those same countries, hundreds of millions of other people are still poor peasants, most of them lacking any title to the land. About a billion of them earn as little as one or two dollars per day, making them even poorer than the cheap labor contingents in the factories. Many commentators in the world media often make a big deal about how still other millions of people in those same regions have recently left behind abject poverty to join a huge new “middle class”. But those observers seem to forget that the Third World definition of the middle class refers to people earning a few thousand dollars a year, less than a tenth of what is required to get into the lower ranks of the middle class in the world’s richer countries.

Meanwhile, back in those somewhat richer countries, tens of millions of people are still working in factories, but the majority of the population now toil instead in the service sector. Professional optimists also classify many of them as middle class, ignoring the fact that most of them earn only slightly more than the minimum wage. In any case, even though the total wealth generated in such countries has increased hundreds of times since the 1960s for rich people, it has not increased at all for the middle class. In the USA, the American dream has been dead in the water since 1972, overall upward mobility in all the rich countries having become a thing of the past.

At the same time, a very small number of people spread out all over the world are making twenty or thirty million dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of much less fortunate people are barely avoiding starvation. Since the urban revolution in the Middle East 6000 years ago, at no time in history has the income gap between the social classes ever been higher. In Marxist lingo, this means that the objective conditions for world social revolution have never been better.

Unfortunately, however, the subjective conditions have never been worse, since no organized, world-wide, genuinely labor or socialist movements currently exist. The abject failure of state capitalism, back in the twentieth century, to provide a credible alternative to private capitalism, has completely eliminated whatever hope for the future that people may have had in the past. The only international organizations for progressive social change that exist right now are intellectual chimeras, comprising only a few thousand members each. Most working-class people nowadays are either not involved in politics at all or support neofascist parties instead.

In most countries, people are so desperate for jobs that they will do anything to get work. At the bottom of the heap, hundreds of millions of people have been tricked by fraudsters into becoming real slaves with no income at all, even though slavery as an institution became illegal in the last remaining slave state (Mauritania) back in 1980. Millions of young people, including many of those in the so-called rich countries, have also signed on for voluntary slavery by accepting unpaid internships in order to get the work experience necessary for (maybe) acquiring a real job later on. Employers have no compunctions whatever to support slavery nowadays as long as no one uses that term in public, since it was supposed to have died out as an institution back in the nineteenth century.

On a world scale, the industrial working class has never been bigger. The total working class, including agricultural, industrial, transport, service workers and illegal-service workers (prostitutes, criminals, etc.) make up the vast majority of the world’s population. Landed peasants, genuine middle-class people (making between 20 and 100 thousand dollars per year) and homeless beggars make up most of the rest. One percent of the world earn over 100 000 dollars per year, but only one percent of one percent (one person in every ten thousand) belong to the ruling class, defined as all those people (major investors and leading politicians) making decisions every day that are worth at least one hundred million dollars.

Once upon a time, more specifically between 1945 and 1975 (the thirty glorious years), most of the people in the world’s richest countries could feel relatively good about themselves, because in those days most of the world’s large investors were involved in productive investment and only a minority were hooked on speculation (negative investment). This meant that most people’s incomes were rising significantly during those halcyon decades, not only for a privileged few. But since 1979, with the election of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the simultaneous onslaught of monetarism and neoliberalism, most of the world’s largest investors have moved instead into useless forms of speculative investment. They still claim to be the only ones creating wealth, but in reality they are only robbing the rest of the world economy to create wealth for themselves and no one else.

In other words, nowadays only about 70 million people, out of about seven billion, really have the freedom to do whatever they want. They are the only ones who see life as an amusing comedy, in which they have the power to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content by deliberately ruining the lives of millions of dirty, inferior peons. Most of the rest of the world’s people are forced to see life as a disgusting tragedy instead.