“The Divine Market”
I just finished reading one of the most fascinating books that I have come across since I started publishing this blog eight years ago. Its title is “Le Divin Marché: La révolution culturelle libérale”, published in France by “Éditions Denoël” in 2007 (408 pages in the “essais folio” version). It was written by Dany-Robert Dufour, a French philosopher and professor at several different universities, who at the time of publication was based at the “Institut d’études avancées” in Nantes. Dufour is an unusually prolific and well-read intellectual, who is extremely adept at puncturing the grossly inflated egos of dozens of the Western world’s most over-rated supporters of laissez-faire, from Adam Smith all the way down to Friedrich von Hayek, including such false opponents of classical liberalism as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Bourdieu.
It would have been a big advantage for me to have read this book shortly after it first came out, rather than fourteen years later, because it is an extremely prescient analysis of the neoliberal counter-revolution that started back in the 1970s, and that has never stopped becoming even more influential, and even more reactionary, since that time. However, I found out only a short time ago, by reading a short excerpt, published in the Québec Internet newsmagazine, “L’aut’hebdo” (February 24, 2021), from a much more recent book by Christophe Guilluy, (“Le temps des gens ordinaires”, Flammarion, 2020), that other intellectuals in France are still denouncing neoliberalism in no uncertain terms, even nowadays. I am certainly interested in reading Guilluy’s book as well, as soon as possible, but for now I really want to get back to Dufour’s magnificent contribution, as well as to add my own take on that same subject.
In “The Divine Market”, Dufour does not separate the classical economic liberalism (or laissez-faire) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the much more recent revival of that same ideology, that most analysts, at least in the English-speaking world, now refer to as neoliberalism. Nor does he mention the tendency that many modern economies took, from the 1880s down to the 1980s, to step back from extreme laissez-faire for awhile and to adopt instead a somewhat greater emphasis on state “intervention” into economic and social affairs. Before returning in recent decades to a complete and total endorsement of old-fashioned laissez-faire under the vocable of neoliberalism. For Dufour, the ideological war between ultra-individualist liberalism and its more public opponent, political economy, has been going on without interruption since Adam Smith’s more accomplished predecessor, Bernard de Mandeville, first published “The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits”, back in 1714.
Dufour’s book, however, is not just about the worldwide debate over the best way to run a modern, or a post-modern economy. It is really about the almost totalitarian nature of the most recent forms of ultra-liberalism, which have quite literally taken over practically every aspect of human civilization. Not only in the Western world but also just about everywhere else, including such countries as China, which according to Dufour has been trying (since 1979) to practise both communism and liberalism at the same time, thereby replacing the Chinese Communist Party’s original adhesion to Marxism-Leninism with “Market-Leninism” instead (page 133). Even if trying to follow both of those ideologies simultaneously seems highly paradoxical to most observers, from Dufour’s point of view it is only normal, since Marxism itself was never anything but a socially-conscious extension of liberal economism. Which in his view explains why Marxists always refer to economic production as society’s “base”, while political and cultural aspects of life are merely “superstructure”.
The most fascinating characteristic of Dufour’s book, however, is the fact that it delves very deeply into many interrelated aspects of human life that go way beyond political economy or even the fundamental importance of social-class distinctions. In ten extremely diverse chapters, Dufour brilliantly succeeds in demonstrating how ultra-individualism has managed to take over almost every aspect of society, as uninhibited narcissism, first described by Christopher Lasch back in 1979, threatens to destroy all the institutional conditions of the very society on which it is based (page 25). The first chapter of Dufour’s book is about how what he calls “gregarious egoism” has become the defining principle of the “postmodern herd” of commercialized human beings, whose all-encompassing motto has become “Don’t think! Spend!” (page 33)
In chapter two, he focuses on how human relations everywhere have come to be based on having each ego-gregarious perpetrator use and abuse every other person in that individual’s immediate entourage, in order to satisfy every personal desire. Not only from one generation to another, but also from one sex to another, often through the mechanism of such postmodern phenomena as gender fixation and sex change. But according to Dufour the limits of such eminently false pretensions of ultra-democracy are reached when individual wish-fulfillment (“every day a sunny day with just the right temperature all the time”) is foolishly considered to be capable of overcoming even basic biological limitations (page 86).
In chapter three, he describes the fascinating ways in which the Market has become the most important new divinity, accepting all the other gods that anyone might want to adore, so long as every participant agrees to adore the Market even more. All moral limitations are deemed to have been overcome by the neoliberal elimination of all constraining rules, the free Market being interpreted as nothing less than the way in which “God’s will” itself functions in the postmodern economy (page 124). An excellent example of which being the ideological marriage of the providential market philosophy of George W. Bush and his born-again Christian supporters (page 141). Which in my opinion quite nicely foreshadows the extremely irrational way in which Donald Trump’s fake “Christian nationalist” followers interpreted their own invasion of the US Capitol as a direct intervention of the “divine market” into human affairs.
Dufour develops his analysis of the religious aspect of postmodern reality even further in his fourth chapter, about how Market adoration has eliminated all modern attempts at replacing religion with the much more enlightened transcendentalism of such eighteenth-century secular philosophers as Emmanuel Kant. In his view, the Market has succeeded in putting religion back into spiritual control of postmodern society by imposing what some would call (though Dufour himself does not make this particular comparison) a more Pentecostal, selfish and egotistical, version of Christian good works: “God helps those who help themselves”. Or, as Dufour himself referenced it, the (neoliberal) divine market is nothing but an up-to-date version of nineteenth-century social Darwinism (page 396).
In chapter five, he focuses his attention on how politics and government have both been taken over by what the ultra-individualists call corporate governance, using “civil society” as a weapon to completely control the greatly weakened, neoliberal state. Large capitalist investors, such as those running multinational firms like Monsanto (transgenic monoculture), which has since become part of an even larger enterprise (Bayer), are all insisting on using their “shareholder rights” in order to guarantee the realization of at least 15% quarterly profit on every possible investment (pages 176 and 181). All of which has inevitably led to the almost complete overthrow of the modern welfare state, designed to help out mere ordinary people, and forced a postmodern return to nineteenth-century private charity (laissez-faire), not only in most of the rich countries but also in practically every poorer nation, such as Brazil (page 192).
Chapter six is devoted to discussing how such pro-market philosophers as Michel Foucault so eloquently encouraged political authorities to “free” young students, and knowledge itself, from the control of institutions like schools and universities, not to mention “insane asylums”, by successfully imposing the curious idea that all such social institutions really function as mere extensions of the penitentiary system (page 199). Thereby dumping into the garbage the entire Western tradition, since the days of ancient Greece, of using schools as a method of educating young people (at least those from the aristocracy) to overcome their more primitive passions through cultural development. All of Western culture being dismissed by such postmodern philosophers as “disguised barbarism” (page 203), which seems to me to be a kind of negative projection on their part, with the result that laissez-faire has been reimposed as the “new” method for liberating people from every possible institutional constraint (page 212).
Chapter seven is about ultra-liberalism’s perversion of language as well, building on George Orwell’s concept of “newspeak” to investigate the various ways in which the postmodern, market ideology has managed to creep into modern language. The ultimate goal being to replace another Orwellian concept, concerning the “common decency” of ordinary working people, by turning ignorance itself (freedom from knowledge) into one of the most important, postmodern “human rights” (pages 254, 258 and 259). Thereby changing the ways in which people speak to each other nowadays, by adopting new, market-friendly meanings for thousands of highly significant words and concepts, as well as by reworking grammatical rules themselves to achieve the same overall goal. In other words, an updated version of the folkish newspeak of the Third Reich (page 259). Or, as Philip Roth put it, since we cannot understand what philosophers from Antiquity were talking about, it must be their fault, not ours, and we should therefore remove them from the school curriculum altogether (page 273).
Chapter eight is about the legal system, showing how the market economy has come to treat illegal activity as simply another useful section of the larger market, criminal operations constituting about 20% of all commercial activity in the year 2000 (page 307). Which has led to glorifying the concept of how “crime pays”, an old-fashioned ideology currently being redeveloped in popular culture, particularly through the notoriety of several well-known rap artists (page 304). All of which is gradually eliminating the distinction between private law and public law, still quite important (at least back in 2007) in countries like France, with its codified legal statutes, but which is being overcome by the influence of the procedural jurisprudence of “Anglo-Saxon” common law, much more accommodating toward market domination of everything legal.
Worldwide, according to Dufour, this “liberated” attitude toward criminal activity is responsible for the recrudescence of a long list of barbarian assaults in every social domain, including such abominations as child rape, the burning of young girls to death in front of their applauding neighbours, “vulture-capitalist” firms constantly attacking the poorest countries in the world, foreign investors profiting immensely from overseas dictatorships, and so on and so forth (pages 315-316). In his opinion, ultra-liberalism’s anti-institutional attitude is responsible for reviving all kinds of totalitarian behaviour nowadays (page 314), a point of view that dovetails quite nicely with my own analysis, in several recent blogposts, about how neoliberalism has become the antechamber of neofascism. Dufour also sees the current wave of symbolic “political correctness” as another postmodern invention directed against Orwell’s description of the “common decency” of the working-class (page 336).
Chapter nine is about how the transition from modern art toward contemporary art has been accompanied by an overwhelming emphasis on artistic subversion, in which egotistical artists present almost any pile of junk that they may throw together as “a major contribution” to humanity, each individual artist thereby fooling the uneducated public into believing that even the most pedestrian work must somehow signify something important, even when it does not (page 349). The sublime aspect of at least the goals of all previous art therefore being replaced by the total and deliberate absence of any kind of artistic meaning whatsoever (page 358).
The tenth, and last, chapter being about the subconscious, focusing on the postmodern tendency to abandon any real treatment of mental illness, by encouraging people to “free” their innermost drives and desires from all external control, and to enjoy unlimited satisfaction of every “natural drive” instead. A process in which the “liberation” of people from any form of control over what Sigmund Freud called “polymorphous perversion” has led to the subsequent abandonment of transcendental cultural development (as in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment), that Dufour equates with the acquisition of the capacity for critical thinking (pages 389 and 396).
In his conclusion, Dufour also inveigles against the “nonsensical project” of trying to solve every kind of problem by using modern technology (page 398), as well as capitalism’s incapacity to help save the natural environment, by repudiating rampant extractivism and therefore leaving at least one-third of all fossil fuels in the ground where they belong (page 400). He also reiterates another theme that he had already mentioned in several of his chapters, denouncing the hypocritical attitudes of populist politicians all over the world, like former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (since convicted in court of rampant corruption), who repeatedly use law-and-order crackdowns on the kind of discontent that was caused by their very own neoliberal policies (page 405).
Of which, I might add, we have seen many more examples since this book was written, notably during the presidency of that narcissistic monstrosity known as Donald J. Trump, who became so very popular in the USA because of his supporters complete identification with his obvious moral bankruptcy, quite similar to their own ways of thinking and acting. Or the way in which Trump, as well as imitators like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and their ultra-right-wing populist disciples all over the world, enormously worsened the negative effects of the current pandemic by trying to ignore it completely.
What I like the most about Dufour’s exposition is that he does not just rely on a straightforward presentation of his extremely disturbing insights, but that he really takes the time to explain each one of his arguments very carefully, abundantly citing the works of dozens of other observers who have also developed one or another aspect of his overall interpretation. A good example of which (pages 167 and 402) being Karl Polanyi, in his 1944 work on “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time”, who promoted a much more state-interventionist form of modern capitalism than the postmodern nightmare in which we are now living. Dufour also manages to present all his findings with his frequent use of wry humour, taking enormous delight in skewering every ridiculously pretentious attempt his opponents have made at explaining their considerably more puerile points of view.
There is a great deal more extremely insightful content in Dufour’s book than what I have been able to summarize in the above thumbnail sketch of its chapters. In “The Divine Market”, however, which is only one of several more such books published by him both before and after this one, Dufour only hints at what he would consider to be a remedy for the kind of dystopian universe into which we have all blundered. I consulted the Internet to try and find out more about what he might be proposing more recently, and came across quite a few references to his contention that today’s intellectuals, particularly those in the Western world, should be trying to resuscitate the European Renaissance of the early-modern period of history, based on reviving and further developing the ideas contained in such fundamental Renaissance works as Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (first published in 1496).
It would certainly be a marvellous contribution to humanity if such a “Renaissance 2.0” were to succeed, or even to get a bit further beyond its current status as a project that only a limited number of intellectuals seem to be working on nowadays. I have a great deal of scepticism, however, toward the whole idea of trying to recreate in today’s world the conditions necessary to succeed in such a project, that has also been proposed, even during the 1980s, by other groups of intellectuals who also inveigled for awhile against the return of laissez-faire.
Even though Dufour vehemently denies that his thinking is not at all “tied to the past” and that he is most certainly not “an old reactionary” (page 387), the emphasis in his book on the wonderful achievements of classical Western civilization in the ancient world, as well as on those of the Renaissance, and of the Enlightenment, seem to me to be, nevertheless, too focused on the glories of the past. In spite of the incredible achievements of those particular periods of Western history, they only represent a part, albeit an extremely significant part, of humanity’s achievements as a whole.
In today’s (theoretically) post-colonial world, any attempt at trying to revive the European Renaissance inevitably comes up against competing agendas originating in various other, non-European, non-Western civilizations such as those in China (and East Asia in general), in India, in the Muslim world and among the world’s extremely varied indigenous peoples. There seem to be even more people working on one or another of those projects, these days, than there are people in the West working on an up-to-date version of the Renaissance. All of those projects also seem to be focused on a sort of intellectual version of popular identity politics, that always bog down in trying to convince every other culture into believing in the universal pretensions of every competing project. In my view, today’s emphasis should be on how to provoke some kind of honest, worldwide convergence on the things that all human beings really do have in common. Thereby implicating all those from every country who detest every one of the different varieties of neoliberalism and of neofascism alike, no matter from which part of the world they originated, nor in which parts of the world those atavistic ways of thinking are currently active.
My own particular take on all of this, that I have been trying to develop more and more thoroughly in my blog, is that all the world’s most reactionary ideologies, not only over-arching ones like neoliberalism, extractivism and neofascism, but also such closely related ideologies as class-based elitism, racism, sexism and age-ism, as well as imperialism, militarism, religious fundamentalism and ethnic exclusivism, are all interwoven and inter-active with each other. Every one of them upholds and reinforces every other one of them, and cannot be properly treated individually, but only as particular aspects of overall barbarian behaviour in general. The systemic nature of each of those ideologies therefore becoming not just verifiable within each of those extremely narrow-minded ways of interpreting the world, but also by forming a necessary part of the world-system itself. All of them are also characteristics of each individual culture that currently exists on this planet, none of those cultures having succeeded in avoiding any of them, to any significant extent.
An excellent example of how they all work together can be found in the Trump movement currently dominating the Republican Party in the USA. A group of evangelical-Christian leaders in that country, led by Billy Graham’s grand-daughter, Jerushah Duford, recently denounced the pro-Trump “Christian nationalists” as being falsely Christian, since they are not the least bit interested in “turning the other cheek”, nor in “loving thy neighbour as thyself”, nor in any of the other formal Christian concepts that ultra-right-wing populists dismiss as “sissy” or “goody-goody nonsense”. The Trump movement only claims to be Christian in the fake-news sense that many millions of other religious extremists all over the world also claim to be Christian (such as in Hungary or Poland), because they consider doing so to be part of their cultural identity, which in their view sets them apart from all the world’s “inferior” cultures.
More or less in the same fashion that the neofascist “National Rally” movement in France also self-identifies with fundamentalist forms of Christianity, as part of its all-out attempt to gain political support by portraying Islam, and all the other religions in the world, as being necessarily diabolic. Which is also the same adjective being simultaneously used by Muslim fundamentalists, particularly the extremists in Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, to describe Christianity! Personally, I do not support Christianity, Islam nor any other kind of metaphysical, other-worldly religion, but I have to agree with Duford that the “Christian nationalist”, neofascist organizations do not seem to have much in common with any of the more socially generous concepts being promoted in official documents like the New Testament.
I also have to point out, however, that the Trump movement, just like most of the other neofascist forms of religious fundamentalism, those currently dominating the Muslim world, but also “Hindu nationalism” in India, Buddhist extremism in places like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, the official revival of Confucianism in China, and of Shintoism in Japan, is not really all that patriotic either. “Make America great again” is not genuinely nationalist or patriotic in any real sense because it is not being used to promote the overall welfare of the entire population of the USA, but is only being used as a smokescreen for white supremacism, as well as for extreme misogyny. Not to mention promoting highly militarized US imperialism, still earnestly attempting to maintain control over the entire world economy for the financial benefit of its enormous, multinational corporations. Donald Trump himself, not just in the current phase of his existence, but throughout his entire morally (and financially) bankrupt life, is an excellent example of the polymorphous perversion that Dufour was talking about in his book.
Trump is also not the least bit interested in helping the working-class in the USA, not even the larger, lily-white section of that same class, in any real way, which would necessarily involve using the powers of the state to overthrow neoliberalism altogether, to raise taxes on rich people again, to the levels that were imposed back in the post-war period (the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975), and to adopt a new form of welfare state that would go way beyond anything that ever existed in that country, even during Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” (the second, progressive version of that policy, which began in 1935).
The Trump movement only uses nationalism as an identity-politics slogan, just like its fake-news support for Christianity, and its equally false promise to bring massive numbers of good-paying industrial jobs back to the USA. Ultra-conservative billionaires in that country are not giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the majority, pro-Trump section of the Republican Party, after all, because they truly support a national industrial policy or a public welfare policy. They really like keeping the minimum wage in the USA down around seven dollars an hour, as part of their “shareholder rights”, capital-accumulation strategy, and would never support any minimum wage significantly higher than that.
They are also quite happy to continue to import most of the manufactured goods, as well as most of the raw materials, that the US economy needs in order to function even minimally, if not from China, where the average wage has increased a little bit recently, then from any other even poorer country capable of doing the same kind of work for next to nothing. People everywhere have to realize that all the well-funded political parties in the entire world, especially the most populist ones, do not belong to ordinary working people in any country. They always and forever belong to Big Business in one way or another, even in red-billionaire countries like China.
Democracy in the dictionary sense of the word, that is genuinely serving the best interests of the majority of the population (the working-class in most parts of the world), does not exist now, never has genuinely existed in the past, and does not seem to be coming into being anywhere at all these days. Quite the contrary. In today’s world, the working-class comprises a much bigger absolute number of people than it ever did before, and a much larger relative percentage of the world population than it ever did in the past. Nevertheless, its very existence has been completely denied by the neoliberal people running most of the countries on this planet. All the other social classes have also been “abolished” in the same idiotic fashion. Quite an amazing feat, in a world in which social divisions have never been so accentuated, a few people nowadays making 100 million US dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of other people are only making an average of one dollar per day!
The dominant trend in the world today is toward the same kind of ultra-narcissistic, ultra-right-wing, simultaneously neoliberal and neofascist movement, as the one that Trump leads. The goal of which seems to be creating an organization based on a highly incestuous relationship between each charismatic leader and his extremely infantile followers, who adore their Chief because he is so much like them, so comfortably racist, sexist, fake-religious, fake-patriotic and fake-democratic. Even the food that Trump eats is eminently populist and anti-nutrition, based mostly on things like massive hamburgers and jugs of Coca-Cola, chock full of sugar, salt and fat, just the kind of extremely well-advertised crap that most of the US population loves to eat so much. To top it all off, the guy always deliberately avoids making any kind of physical or intellectual effort whatsoever, the laziness of which is probably the thing that they love the most about their illustrious leader. This is what the Divine Market has created, not only in the USA but also in dozens of other countries, every indication being that it is also very much the wave of the future, if not always fully developed everywhere in the world, right now.
Which brings my argument around to the sociological concept of how systemic racism in the USA, to return again to the same fascinating example, was built around the reaction of the “poor white trash” in the southern states, against the emancipation of black slaves during the Civil War. The poor whites were extremely upset at the prospect of having to share their country with free people of African origin, because for them the “Afro-Americans” were the only group even lower down than they were in the extremely demoralizing social hierarchy that prevailed in nineteenth-century “America”. They absolutely refused to become the people at the very bottom of the social heap and therefore enthusiastically supported the violent, Ku Klux Klan methods being used by the recently-defeated leaders of the Southern confederacy to reinstate traditional, anti-black racism in the form of “Jim Crow” segregation. Which similar movements have constantly revived in that country, up to and including the Trump nation.
In my opinion, the reactionary attitude of the “poor white trash” back then, in that particular country, is simply one specific version of the same kind of attitude adopted, in one form or another, in every other country in the world, during every period of history since the end of the Neolithic period and the subsequent, gradual rise of urban civilization on every continent, starting about 6000 years ago. In the worldwide hierarchy of social classes, produced and reproduced over and over again in every culture, each dominant ruling class, at the very top of the pyramid, always lorded it over all the different layers of subordinated classes. Each dominated ensemble was progressively poorer, less powerful and more numerous than the one directly above it, all the way down to the largest group, the extremely numerous, ultra-poor people at the very bottom of every heap.
In fact, very large numbers of extremely poor people have not gone away at all, not even in China, in spite of Xi Jinping’s claim to have recently eliminated extreme poverty in his country. The proof of its continued existence being his regime’s arbitrary definition of “extreme” levels of poverty as earning less than $1.70 per day, per person, when it should have been fixed (even in China) at a much higher figure than that. If Xi’s goal was in fact to do away with extreme poverty as such, he would not have placed the cut-off point so dismally low. Not to forget, however, that there are dozens of other countries, such as India, in which even more extreme levels of poverty than those in China currently exist. Levels that the even more ultra-liberal Modi government seems to be doing its best to drive down even further, especially by deregulating agricultural prices at the expense of that country’s 300 million poor farmers, who have been on strike against that policy for the past several weeks.
Throughout world history, the names as well as the definitions of each superior, middling and inferior social classes changed quite a bit from place to place, and from time to time, but always maintained roughly the same general profile, from around 4000 years B. C., down to the present day. Each one of those huge groupings, or classes, developed ways of thinking, or ideologies, to explain away its respective place in the social system, using every possible kind of division between people that could be found in order to somehow “justify” adopting a “feel-good” attitude even for social classes near the bottom of every heap.
On the way up, or down, the layers of the pyramid, that meant endorsing or developing some particular form of elitism, racism, sexism, age-ism, imperialism (including economic extractivism of raw materials), militarism, religious fundamentalism, ethnic exclusivism, ultra-liberalism and/or fascism, in order to provide the ideological content necessary to “explain” each group’s particular place in the social pyramid. Different forms of all those reactionary ideologies being adopted all the time, according to each group’s particular prejudices, to make it easier for everyone in each specific class to accept his or her role in society without losing too much face, thereby artificially maintaining each social class’s “anti-further-down” pride in its own given situation, no matter how close to the bottom that each such class was positioned.
True, the list of ideologies given above is heavily weighted toward relatively recent examples of all the myriad ideologies that have existed in the world over the past 6000 years. But so far as I can tell, after reading a couple hundred books about the history of Western civilization and the history of the “Third World” since pre-colonial times, during my career as a college and university teacher, those modern ideologies are often secular versions of ways of thinking that used to be expressed mostly in religious terms during the pre-modern periods of world history, in all the world’s extremely numerous and extremely varied cultures.
All of which helps to explain how the various systems of political, economic, social and cultural domination, in every part of the world, remained in place for thousands of years, each inferior class trying to make sure that it never ended up in the very last place. The emperors at the tip top of society directed their sneering disdain of the merely regional aristocrats directly beneath them (as described in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”), the aristocrats then passed on the same downward-sneering attitude toward the bourgeois merchants (private capitalists) directly beneath them, who sneered at the peasants and the proletarians beneath them (at the level of the “poor white trash”), who also despised the slaves underneath them, at the very bottom of every participating society. Along the way, many of those enormous groupings also sub-divided into constituent layers, the bourgeois investors, for example, being divided from the start into a small gang of bigger investors and a larger, lower-down grouping of much smaller owners of capital. Even the slaves were quite often separated between the somewhat better-treated house slaves and the much worse-treated field slaves.
At the same time, the men at each level practised the same kind of sneering disdain for the women, and the children, inside each family. Just like the men from a country in the “Third World” that I watched in a recent documentary on television, explaining quite openly, and quite proudly, to visiting journalists how the role of women in their society was, and always has been, to serve the men. Even when they were quite often unemployed themselves, sitting around the public square with a lot of time on their hands. All over the world, in every century, everyone involved has been keeping the entire class system in place by always finding someone inferior to sneer at, in order to save face for himself (or sometimes even for herself).
As in the lyrics of the very realistic, nineteenth-century, working-class song in the USA, “Sixteen tons”, in which the strongest, coal-shovelling worker in every particular locality lorded it over all the weaker male workers, but still had to work extremely hard until the day he died because he “owed his soul to the company store”. A system of control that existed all over the world back then and not just among coal miners in the Appalachian Mountains. The social aspect of this entire pyramid always being mirrored everywhere by a similar system of geopolitical domination, the strongest tribes, or empires, or imperial nations, in every large region (or worldwide in more recent examples) lording it over the mid-size ones, who also lorded it over the even weaker ones. As they all still do nowadays.
Each one of the dozen or so reactionary ideologies listed is constantly being used and reused, revived, interpreted and reinterpreted, in order to cover every possible local situation. Which gives the lie to every attempt, particularly in recent times, to refuse to recognize any of those ideologies as being systemic, since they are always and forever systemic, all over the world. They have constantly received a great deal of support by themselves, but also as part and parcel of a world-ideological system of combined and inter-related, reactionary ideologies, each one of them contributing its own form of domination to the overall complex of ways in which to “justify” the existence of some particular form of control, exploitation, oppression and extreme mistreatment of millions, and more recently billions, of increasingly (at each level) “inferior” people.
Of course over the centuries human beings have also come up with a whole series of progressive ideologies as well, such as some of the more recent ones, that favour or seem to favour social progress, such as trade unionism, feminism, socialism, communism, and so on. Modern forms of worldwide socialism, for example, have come to replace ancient and medieval forms of communitarian socialism, often associated with religion, in many different parts of the world. In the case of socialism and communism, however, the least that can be said is that though they have often received a great deal of support, especially over the past couple of centuries, they have not been blessed with a great deal of success. The words themselves, socialism and communism, really designated the same underlying reality at the beginning, namely the attempt to conceive of a world without social classes, or any other inferior or superior states of being.
During the twentieth century, in particular, nonviolent, democratic socialism (or just socialism by itself) came to be separated, at least in some minds, from often violent, revolutionary socialism, also known as communism. But the most fascinating thing about those two progressive-minded ideologies is that they never really lasted very long, if at all, in their pristine, original states of being. As in the case of the “communist” countries of the twentieth century, constantly setting up a new class of bureaucratic “state capitalists” in each “revolutionary nation-state”, to replace the domination of the private capitalists, whenever the bourgeoisie in some countries came to be temporarily overthrown. The revolutionary aspect of those attempts almost immediately morphing (shortly after every revolution) into totalitarianism instead.
Democratic socialism, for its part, also drummed up a great deal of support over the same last two centuries, but fell apart completely during the 1980s, when all the socialist leaders and the political parties supporting them caved in to neoliberalism instead. Some of those formerly socialist and communist parties still exist as political entities nowadays, such as the “Communist” Party of China, but none of them managed to retain any positive relationship, so to speak, with the original dictionary definitions that they were presumed to possess at the beginning of their worldwide existence.
Which meant that the most fascinating thing about those two theoretically progressive ideologies is that they did not remain progressive for very long, and did not in fact succeed in setting up genuinely socialist or communist societies. In other words, unlike all the reactionary ideologies mentioned above, the lack of success (in real terms) became the most important characteristic of both of them. Feminism and trade unionism have succeeded in currying considerable support as well, but have not really transformed society all that much, either.
Today’s theoretically left-wing movements, as Dufour pointed out in his book, have abandoned all attempts at genuine social change, their support for feminism, for example, being confined to promoting individual success for bourgeois and middle-class women (“breaking the glass barrier”), abandoning the lower rungs of society altogether. For its part, since the beginning of the neoliberal onslaught, trade unionism has declined drastically just about everywhere. All of which has inevitably created a “new” clientele for reactionary ideologies such as neofascism, just like it already created a new clientele for “classical fascism” back in the twentieth century.
The current domination of the entire world by the neoliberal and the neofascist ideologies has left us in a deplorable state of affairs nowadays. We are all living in a world where millions of people still capable of performing at high speed are working extremely hard, and always even quickly than before, to produce as much wealth as possible, most of which is accumulated by enormous private fortunes that just keep on getting bigger and bigger all the time. The multimillionaires and the billionaires who possess these unprecedentedly huge fortunes feel no compunction whatsoever in continuing to accumulate such colossal sums, even though they are finding it increasingly difficult to figure out what to do with all their available capital.
They are all part and parcel, however, of a worldwide system that vehemently refuses to even contemplate slowing down a bit and letting any of the other people in the world catch up even minimally. Everyone in the world-system feels psychologically compelled to “keep on keeping on”, more or less in the same fashion as many other unfortunate people feel just as compelled to consume enormous quantities of harmful drugs, not only alcohol and tobacco but also marijuana, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and God knows what else.
There does not seem to be any way of convincing most people, at all levels of society and in every country, to step back a bit and to reconsider how incredibly foolish running over the cliff like a bunch of lemmings really is, after all. Thousands of dedicated individuals and groups all over the world are trying to use support for the natural environment, emphasizing the dangers of such things as climate change, to help convince other people to step back from the brink, from the “eve of destruction”, as Barry McGuire once put it in his song about nuclear annihilation. But the fanatical hordes of neoliberal and neofascist true believers remain deliriously happy, regardless, because they think that they have “freed” themselves forever from every kind of moral inhibition, worrying about the future of humanity and “stuff like that”. They refuse to accept any of the moral constraints about which all the “doomsday predictors” are always trying to convince them. Which, to say the least, does not bode well for the future.
