Everything is systemic

According to Chad Wolf, Donald Trump’s acting Secretary of Homeland Security, there is no systemic racism in the USA. The premier of Québec, François Legault, has also once again made the same statement about how racism in Québec is not systemic either. He seems to think that this is true because most people in Québec are not openly racist and because his government is officially opposed to all forms of racism. A very similar point of view, about the total absence of systemic racism throughout Canada was also expressed recently by Stockwell Day, who used to be a minister in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. His comments caused such a furore that he decided to resign from his post in the English-Canadian media and to give up his place as a board member in a couple of well-known Canadian corporations.

Unfortunately, the same kind of negative reaction has yet to befall either Chad Wolf or François Legault. What happened to Stockwell Day in Canada could never happen to any top-level US administrator like Chad Wolf, however, for at least as long as Donald Trump remains in power. His white-supremacist way of dealing with mass demonstrations against racism is to completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters, and to fan the flames of repression by calling out the US Army instead. The goal being to “help” the police forces deal with the minuscule minority of looters and arsonists, who are destroying “decent people’s” private property, by shooting them all down dead! More or less in the same way that the Minneapolis police dealt with George Floyd on May 25, and other police forces, not only in the USA but also in Canada, have dealt with other minority victims since then. Which is leading many observers in the Disunited States of America to wonder if that country is not in for a new version of the Civil War, with the Republican Party playing the role of the Confederacy this time around.

Trump thinks that “law and order” means the violent repression of non-white minorities, which is a distinctly barbarian way of interpreting that expression. A more civilized approach to law and order, though still far from ideal, would be the British way of dealing with guns, which are simply banned for civilian use altogether, except for the hunting of wild animals in extremely limited conditions. Guns in the UK are mostly reserved for the military, because the UK still completely supports militarism (NATO, etc.), but inside that country even the vast majority of the police forces do not carry guns. Another good example of what law and order should mean, in a completely different context, comes from several East Asian countries, where face masks are compulsory for people circulating in public, when dealing with a pandemic caused by a contagious, respiratory illness. A third example of civilized law and order would be forcing the world’s richest people, and their private corporations, to pay much higher rates of taxation than poor people do, by shutting down every last one of their tax evasion schemes worldwide. It is no accident that the Trump barbarian most definitely does not support any of those civilized ideas.

As for François Legault, he still seems to be riding out the media storm, on the grounds that admitting the existence of systemic racism in his province would mean participating in the kind of “Québec bashing” that has always been the hallmark of the neocolonial federalists running the Canadian government. But the fact that the majority of people, as well as the governments, of many different countries in this world are not openly racist does not prevent any of those places from nevertheless practising systemic racism. Legault’s deliberately wishy-washy definition could even apply to the USA itself, at least during the period when Barack Obama was president of that country.

Whereas being systemic really means having to do with the entire system, indicating that the way that an overall society is set up inevitably leads to a given result. The fact that black people in the USA are proportionately much more likely than white people to be poverty-stricken, to be unemployed, to be in prison, or to get murdered by the police for no reason at all, is what being systemic is all about. All of those things are also happening in Québec, and in the rest of Canada as well, even though the USA’s systemic racism is carried out on a much larger scale, most of the time in a much more “in-your-face” manner.

In reality, every country in the world should take this opportunity to reflect on what systemic racism really means. ‘Races’ as such do not exist in any scientific sense, but racist people do not care all that much about science. When Barack Obama was in office, the USA considered him to be its “first black president”, rather than accepting the fact that he was just as much a white president as a black president, deliberately forgetting what his mother looked like, and where her ancestors came from. The same kind of peculiar choice of words is also exemplified in the US habit of talking about non-whites as being ‘coloured’ people, as if white were not a skin colour just like all the other ones. However, systemic racism does not exist only in the USA, nor does it exist only in the Western world (North America, Europe, Australasia), as is claimed by some extremely misguided, ‘post-colonial’, ideologues. It is also just as present everywhere else in the world as well.

During the Cold War, the only theoretically ‘communist’ countries, such as the USSR and China, had enormous difficulties explaining to their ‘Third World’ allies why it was that so many of the visitors from those countries were so often treated in a racist manner by their hosts. Which was simply an extension of the way in which the dominant ethnic groups in those countries, the Russians and the Han, treated their own ethnic minorities. As did all the other officially ‘communist’ countries, in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America. Black people, indigenous people and ‘different-looking’ people in general are even more often shunned and mistreated nowadays in those same regions than they were then.

This is the case not only in the former ‘communist’ countries, but also in the dozens of countries run by dominant ethnic groups put into power by most of the non-communist, national-liberation movements in almost all the other Asian, African and Latin American countries. Regardless of the year in which each one of those countries became independent. Just like in the Western world, some of those nations treat their minorities a lot worse than do some of the others, but in my opinion no particular country really stands out as a place that does not practise systemic racism at all. Human beings all over the world have a very long way to go in this regard.

It is also extremely important to realize that the systemic nature of racism applies just as much to all the other reactionary ideologies in this world as well, such as imperialism and ethnic exclusivism, with which racism is often closely aligned. Sexism, elitism, extractivism, religious fundamentalism, militarism, neoliberalism and neofascism are also high on the list of the world’s most dangerous, atavistic ideologies, and all of them are also eminently systemic in nature. Even more important than the systemic character of all those ideologies is the fact that they are also very much intertwined one with the other. Each one of them helps to prop up all the other ones, and it is impossible to seriously fight against just one of those ultra-right-wing ideologies without fighting against all of them at the same time.

Any movement, such as the anti-racist movement, that attempts to get somewhere, seeking to make the world a much better place in which to live, will tie itself up into knots if it tries to succeed by focusing exclusively on its own immediate target. The same thing goes for anti-sexism, anti-elitism, anti-imperialism, the peace movement and all the other progressive movements. They are all up against the whole panoply of mutually sustaining, antediluvian ideologies, even if the people belonging to those progressive movements do not always seem to be aware of the fact that those same reactionary systems always support each other.

Unfortunately, people in every part of the world, even many of those who participate regularly in anti-racist movements, often contribute to other forms of social discrimination, such as sexism, at the same time. Thereby significantly reducing the positive effect of their anti-racism in the fight for overall social equality. Racial equality can never be attained if it is accompanied  by anti-feminist sexism, for the obvious reason that half the people of any particular skin colour in the world are female. Deliberately backward people like Donald Trump tend to display both their racism and their sexism quite openly, making them obvious targets for the anti-racist and anti-sexist movements, at the same time.

But if today’s anti-racist demonstrators want to genuinely succeed in their efforts, they will also have to repudiate the mistakes made in the past from within their own movements, as when one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party infamously proclaimed, way back when, that the position of women in his organization was prone! The fact that women were actually quite active and influential in the BPP, in spite of such openly idiotic statements, did not diminish very much the negative effect of such declarations on the uninitiated general public, white and black. Even the USA’s most prominent anti-racist icon, Martin Luther King, Junior, left himself open for attack in this regard by his repeated philandering. King understood quite well that racism was very closely related to the elitist domination of ‘inferior’ social classes, a stance that resulted in his being assassinated just before leading a Poor People’s March on Washington. But by his own admission, he was not nearly as lucid about his attitudes toward women.

Back in the 1960s, very few of the people involved in politics, not only old-fashioned, conservative-minded people and wishy-washy liberals but also many of those engaged in progressive politics, were any more lucid about women’s liberation, a situation that only began slowly changing during the 1970s. In Québec for example, most of the union leaders in the 1960s still felt that their almost exclusively male members should be getting higher pay from their employers, not only for the usual reasons, but also so that the women in their lives could stay home and take care of the children, rather than having to work for wages alongside their menfolk. Equal pay for equal work was not then a part of the trade-union agenda.

In a similar sort of way, Trump’s racism is much more obvious than the racism practised by more discreet leaders nowadays, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Who pretends to be both anti-racist and anti-sexist, but does not turn out to be genuinely committed to either of those goals. Trudeau has been in power for the past five years without yet having done anything at all to provide adequate drinking water to dozens of indigenous communities in Canada that have always lacked such facilities. Even when doing exactly that was supposed to have been his government’s “number one top priority” from the very beginning. Lip-service toward fighting racism, as well as fighting against any other form of reactionary behaviour, such as sexism, has always been the main characteristic of discreetly liberal regimes like Trudeau’s government.

Insincere opposition to sexism, however, has also been practised over the years by many of the male-dominated leaderships of Canada’s ‘First Nations’ of aboriginal peoples. Until quite recently, the vast majority of the band councils in most Canadian indigenous communities supported a rule, initially introduced by the neocolonial Canadian government, that excluded indigenous women married to non-indigenous men from belonging to each individual nation, while simultaneously accepting as members men married to non-indigenous women. Which is certainly not the right way to go about fighting for social equality. That rule has since been rescinded, but the mistreatment of indigenous women by indigenous men, in dozens of other ways, is every bit as widespread in those communities as it is in the non-indigenous part of the Canadian population.

Elitism is also just as systemic as racism and sexism, the basis of elitist domination of society being the fundamental division of all the currently existing cultures into social classes. In fact, the systemic domination of what are called ‘superior’ classes of people over so-called ‘inferior’ classes of people quite often subsumes both racism and sexism. In the very real sense that the lowest classes of any given society almost always tend to include larger percentages of people who are treated as if they were either racially or sexually ‘inferior’ to self-designated ‘superior’ people. Or both at the same time, non-white women being disproportionately assigned to jobs considered to be the lowest of the low, such as serving as orderlies in long-term care centres. In other words, it is completely impossible to get rid of systemic racism, anywhere at all, if people do not simultaneously get rid of sexism and elitism as well.

Liberal-minded regimes, such as the one run by Trudeau in Canada, or the one run by Legault in Québec, or the one run a few years ago by Obama in the USA, or the one currently run by Emmanuel Macron in France, are not capable of passing the litmus test of anti-elitism. Their only superficial opposition to racism and to sexism falls apart just as soon as someone underlines the fact that their all-out, pro-capitalist support for social-class elitism never seems to work in a non-sexist way, such as when it comes to genuinely preventing non-white women from dominating the lowest ranks of the social ladder. ML King pulled the rug out from under the feet of the liberal fakers of the past, part of the way, when he emphasized racism’s reliance on elitism, but he unfortunately ‘forgot’ to underline the same kind of linkage that sexism has always had with both racism and elitism.

Neoliberalism is also very much a leading, thoroughly reactionary, and systemic ideology. This is an ideology currently promoting the social interests of the world’s most important private investors, or capitalists. As a social class, private capitalists first came into being in human society about 500 years ago, during the long-drawn-out decline of aristocratic feudalism in Europe, contributing their ‘economic expertise’ to the mercantilist expansion of Western imperialism across the rest of the world. During the industrial revolution that began during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the doctrine of economic and social liberalism, or laissez-faire, promoted by private capitalism, emerged as a fully developed ideology dedicated to making sure that the ‘nouveaux riches’ would henceforth take over the entire state apparatus and exploit all the ‘inferior’ classes of society, such as the industrial workers, for their almost exclusive benefit.

However, during the so-called neomercantilist period, from about the 1880s to the 1980s, the nouveaux riches were forced to tolerate the existence of anti-capitalist trade unions and anti-imperialist movements in the colonies. Both of which profited from the political crises created by inter-imperialist rivalry, the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of state capitalism in the Soviet bloc. But that tendency was itself reversed during the early 1980s, when old-fashioned, private-capitalist, laissez-faire morphed into neoliberalism, and succeeded in re-imposing the domination of private capitalism in many different parts of the world. Complete with free trade and private-sector globalization, massive tax evasion and equally massive political corruption, weak or non-existent trade unions, neocolonial collaboration with imperialism, and so on. In other words, a ‘brave new world’ based on unlimited economic growth to be gained exclusively through the maximization of ultra-individualist, short-term (quarter-year) profit for every private, multinational investor rich enough to participate in that ‘open conspiracy’.

Austerity programs were also re-introduced in all the countries under neoliberal control, resulting in the widespread dilution, or wholesale dismantling, of most of the more or less social-democratic health, education and welfare programs that had been gradually set up during the neomercantilist period. The general idea being to make sure that almost all the wealth in the world, from the 1980s to the present, would go exclusively toward satisfying ‘shareholder rights’, rather than the rights of any of the other, only theoretical, ‘stakeholders’. While simultaneously convincing all the world’s ‘inferior’ people, not rich enough to belong to the rogues gallery of major investors, that they would also eventually gain something from the ‘trickle-down effect’ of all that privatized wealth. An empty political promise that none of the neoliberal corporations and their subordinated governments ever intended to respect.

Neoliberal capitalism also decided to reinforce another extremely destructive force known as extractivism, that had already been established in every industrialized country, as well as throughout the colonial and postcolonial world, to provide the raw materials for the ever-expanding industrial revolution. Not only for the first phase of the industrial revolution, largely based on coal and steam-power, but also for the second, third and fourth phases of technological development, resulting in today’s world of cybernetics and the mining of ‘big data’ drawn from the entire population, as if human beings were just another ‘natural resource’. All of those phases depending very heavily on a world-wide system concentrating on the physical extraction of raw materials and sources of power, scouring the planet in a constantly expanding search for ever greater quantities of industrial inputs. In order to provide constantly expanding sources of corporate profit, at the expense of the natural environment, and at the expense of all the ‘inferior’ social classes in every country.

The only world-system currently existing that sometimes seems to be competing with private capitalism for total control over everything is the system of state capitalism, with government bureaucrats, rather than private investors, running thousands of nationalized, or non-market, firms. Some of those state-capitalist firms were set up in former ‘communist’ nations, such as the People’s Republic of China, while other kinds of state capitalism were also founded in religious theocracies, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. These different kinds of state capitalism will be dealt with in greater detail in the upcoming paragraphs about imperialism and religious fundamentalism, but it is important to emphasize here that all those state-capitalist regimes are also very heavily invested in private capitalism and neoliberalism at the same time. Their ‘non-market’ firms, like their ‘pro-market’ firms, are not being used in a civilized, social-democratic way, in order to provide social services for the general population. They are simply being used by the ruling bureaucracies in a barbarian, or neofascist, way to benefit a small number of egotistical rulers. Who run those firms in the same way that private-profit corporations are run, by excluding any input from the vast majority of the population, belonging to ‘inferior’ social classes.

All those state-capitalist empires, like all the private-capitalist empires, treat the natural environment in the same destructive, extractive manner. As a result, they all collectively create massive quantities of air pollution, water pollution and soil pollution, through excessive reliance on fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture focused on growth hormones and antibiotics, and ‘waste management’ based on throwing away millions of tons of products using ‘planned obsolescence’, such as one-time-use plastics. Feeble attempts are being made at appearing to ‘do something’ about environmental problems, such as fixing theoretical limits on the ‘degrees’ of climate change that ‘the international community’ is allowed to tolerate during each passing year. But somehow the individual goals of each private-capitalist corporation, or each state-capitalist bureaucracy, always take precedence over any of those phoney limits.

Unfortunately for the future of the human race, ‘Gaia’ (the natural world) is fighting back in its own indomitable way. Such as by transferring to people pathogens never before encountered by human beings, from wild animals being sold in ‘wet’ markets in countries like China. That is to say wherever the constant expansion of the human population presses ever closer to animal habitats that had previously been located far away from human habitations. And thereby forcing many different countries into using medieval strategies like social distancing in order to control the number of victims from those new-found pathogens, with enormous negative consequences to the world economy. In other words, if all the reactionary ideologies do not succeed in controlling world population expansion in the near future, ecological collapse will do the job instead.

While we all sit around waiting for that particular catastrophe to happen, we continue to further pollute our own nest by reinforcing several other reactionary ideologies, such as religious bigotry. Which has also been revived recently in a systemic way throughout the world of human beings, particularly but not exclusively in places ruled by fundamentalist forms of religion, known as theocracies. Atavistic religious belief often intersects with ethnic exclusivism and racism, an example of which being the evangelical-christian electoral base of the USA’s Donald Trump. Who insisted on showing off a Bible to the television cameras when he did his photo-op in front of a church across the street from the White House, right after the murder of George Floyd. Trump’s childish, in-your-face method of combining religious bigotry and racism should not lead anyone to think, however, that all the other religious fundamentalists in the world do not just as often practise the same kind of overlap with racism and ethnic exclusivism.

Another extreme example being the Islamic State movement, which regularly takes a great deal of pride, and perverse pleasure, in doing the same kind of thing as often as possible, using severed heads instead of Bibles as props in their own photo-ops. Similarly, although in a much less violent way, Muslim women practising so-called ‘voluntary slavery’, such as by wearing religious-inspired cover-up clothing, are also contributing to anti-feminist sexism whenever they appear in public. No matter how stridently they may claim to have the individualist ‘right’ to be anti-feminist, more or less in the same way that ‘scabs’ (strikebreakers) claim to have the individualist ‘right’ to fight against the union movement. Individualism, as we saw earlier, forms part of the barbarian, neoliberal way of looking at the world, and is unrelated to any kind of genuine progressivism.

But Christianity and Islam are not the only religions that are fundamentally reactionary, from a systemic point of view. Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism and all the other leading religions in the world are also in the same camp, even if some of their believers pretend to be both religious and progressive at the same time. The systemic nature of religious faith, however, is constantly undermining every attempt at straddling the enormous divide between progressive politics and reactionary politics, just like anti-racist movements are always undermined whenever they choose to support sexism or elitism.

Here in Québec, the latest flare-up of race war south of the border has also revived the long-lasting debate between the holier-than-thou people who always pretend that racism here (and in the rest of Canada) is not systemic like in the USA, and those more honest people who realize that even though racism here may not always be as obvious, and as violent, as it has always been in the largest North American country, it is nevertheless profoundly systemic. There is no doubt about the fact that white supremacy in Québec, and in Canada, is strongly supported by the prevailing political, economic, social and cultural system. Black people, indigenous people and most of the other racial minorities do not just happen to find themselves much more often (proportionately) than white people at the bottom of the social heap, just by accident. Just like poor women do not just happen to also end up on the bottom of society, whenever sexism intersects with elitism.

Since the conquest of New France by the British Empire in the eighteenth century, the francophone Québécois (of both sexes) have always been downtrodden, in comparison with anglophone Canadians. Even in today’s Québec, the francophone majority (about 80% of the overall population of more than eight million), while considerably richer now than it was as recently as the 1950s, is still significantly poorer than the anglophone average in the rest of Canada. At the same time, Québec’s anglophone ‘national minority’, that used to be dominated exclusively by people of British origin, has recently absorbed quite a large number of anglophones coming from all sorts of other places, such as former British colonies in the ‘Third World’ (Asia, Africa and Latin America).

Premier Legault’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism here led to a situation in which many of the black anglophone protesters demonstrating against the murder of George Floyd in the USA did not seem any more inclined than Legault was to try to reach out to the ‘other side’, in this case the Québec majority, and therefore to include a significant francophone presence in their marches. Or on their protest signs, which were almost exclusively written in English. In spite of the fact that the francophone section of the black minority in Québec is really quite large, especially because of the ultra-downtrodden Haitian contingent, now well over 250 000 people. The pro-independence Parti Québécois, which used to be in power regularly but is now a much smaller political force than it was before, is currently trying to reconstruct the independence movement by including non-white francophones much more than it ever used to do in the past. Under the leadership of the new party president, Dieudonné Ella Oyono, who was born in Gabon, one of the former French colonies in Africa.

It is not going to be easy, however, for the new PQ president to rally most of the francophone population of Québec into this much more inclusive independence movement, given the current electoral strength of Premier Legault, particularly among white francophones. Legault, himself a former PQ minister, founded his own party, the ‘Coalition Avenir Québec’, in 2011, after having given up on the independence movement altogether. The current debate over systemic racism, directed against such minorities as black people in Québec, indigenous people, as well as various Asian minorities, has underlined the incredible weakness of the provincial government’s ultra-timid approach to anti-racism.

Québec itself is one of several ‘sociological nations’ throughout the world that has never, or at least rarely, succeeded in running its own independent nation-state, more or less in the same category as Catalonia, or Scotland, or Corsica. Or even the dozens of similarly mistreated territories to be found throughout the formerly-colonized ‘Third World’, such as the anglophone region of the dominantly francophone African nation of Cameroun. Most of the francophone Québécois are also white people, just like most of the English-Canadians living in Québec, both of which groups do not suffer from anything like the kinds of systemic racism that downtrodden minorities of both sexes, in Canada and in Québec, have to put up with all the time. Although the vast majority of ordinary Québécois are not barbarians like Donald Trump, some ultra-right-wing, racist individuals in Québec may also be suffering from a form of exclusivism similar to that exhibited by the so-called ‘poor white trash’ in the USA. Where extreme poverty sometimes induces particularly immoral individuals to deliberately mistreat black or indigenous people, so that the poor white populists will not be the ones ending up at the very bottom of the social ladder.

The white, francophone majority in Québec, however, along with non-white francophones, nevertheless suffers from a form of mostly anglophone, Canadian imperialism that fights against the Québec independence movement by considering the ‘French-speaking Canadians’ in Québec as being just another minority ethnic group governed from Ottawa. For example, during the Oka crisis of 1990, also known as the Mohawk Resistance, a violent territorial dispute broke out between a francophone town northwest of Montréal, supported by the Québec government and the provincial police force, and the nearby indigenous, English-speaking, community of Kanesatake. That conflict led to a 78-day armed stand-off that only ended after the intervention of the Canadian Army. The federal government treated the whole thing as a conflict between two rival, Canadian ethnic groups, an attitude that was not shared, to say the least, by either the Québécois or the Mohawks.

At the same time, Canada as a whole also suffers from the deleterious effects of US imperialism, as exemplified in dozens of different kinds of national humiliation over the years, such as the North American free trade deal, recently ‘improved’ (from the USA’s point of view) by Donald Trump’s regime. Which does not prevent white people in both Canada and Québec from practising systemic racism, as well as neocolonialism directed against the indigenous minorities in both countries. The black protesters brandishing their English-language signs in Québec, as well as the French-language government of Québec, are both using colonial languages, so far as the indigenous peoples are concerned. Which are also colonial languages among most of the ‘Third World’ nations, which also continue to use European languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, nowadays.

Imperialism is also one of the reactionary, systemic ideologies that exist alongside racism, sexism, elitism, fundamentalism and so on, constantly interacting with all the others. Once again, even though this article is focused on the USA, Canada and Québec, imperialism is also very much a worldwide phenomenon. It is not at all restricted to Western imperialism, that colonized very large sections of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific islands (including Australia), between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, as some foolish, ‘post-colonial’ ideologues imagine. The first empires were founded about 5000 years ago, long before the concept of the ‘Western world’ was invented, and continued to exist alongside, and even within, the regions also colonized by European imperialism and by US imperialism. White and non-white empires continue to exist nowadays, with the revived Chinese empire very much in the business of trying to replace the tired, but still powerful, US empire as the dominant force in the world today.

Which means that anti-racist movements all over the world, as well as anti-sexist movements, and anti-elitist (democratic socialist) movements, cannot possibly succeed in eliminating the systemic nature of any of those reactionary ideologies without simultaneously taking on imperialism as well. Once again, not only US imperialism and European imperialism, nor only the somewhat less obvious forms of imperialism and neocolonialism that nevertheless exist inside ‘settler nations’ such as Canada and Québec. In order to succeed worldwide, the anti-racist movements (and all the other related movements) also have to take on Chinese imperialism, Russian imperialism, Japanese imperialism and all the other forms of imperialism also being practised by somewhat less powerful countries such as India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and so on.

Racism is not only systemic because of its interaction with sexism and elitism, but also very much because of its interaction with imperialism. And with the kind of ethnic exclusivism currently practised by dozens of ruling parties all over the world, even in some of the smaller nations, such as Myanmar or Hungary. Ethnic exclusivism is just another reactionary ideology that, like imperialism and religious fundamentalism, currently fuels the rise of neofascism on every continent. For its part, today’s neofascism is a lot like its predecessor, the ‘classical’ fascism of the twentieth century, not only because they both rely on ethnic exclusivism and religious fanaticism in order to survive.

But also because both fascism and neofascism were and are divided up into several different kinds of practitioners, some of them often appearing to be more or less ferocious than others. For example, the full-fledged fascism of Nazi Germany can be contrasted with the somewhat less ferocious fascism of the New Life Movement and the Blue Shirt youth movement, sponsored by Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kai-chek) inside the Chinese Nationalist Party. In a somewhat similar way in which the neofascism of the Islamic State movement gives the impression of being considerably more ferocious than is the neofascism of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, at least at the moment. Which could all simply be ideological illusions based on the relative strength, or weakness, of either form of fascism within its overall historical context.

Which brings us to militarism, closely associated with all the different forms of imperialism, but which is also substantially practised by all sorts of countries, including even several dozen nations that do not seem powerful enough to successfully practise any kind of regional imperialism. Huge countries like the USA, Russia and China (especially the USA) spend enormous quantities of money every year on maintaining and developing extremely expensive weapons systems, which help to prevent those countries from being able to spend a great deal more money on fulfilling the health, education and welfare needs of the general population, instead. But ‘middle powers’ like Canada also spend far too much money on contributing to military forms of waste, as well as upholding the military alliances (such as NATO) and the reactionary foreign policies of their favourite ‘big brothers’ (the USA in Canada’s case). People in the peace movement have never been able to persuade the leaders of such countries to give up their own reactionary obsessions.

In spite of all this reactionary behaviour, a lot of progressive-minded people in many different countries nowadays feel that we currently have an opportunity to really make a major change in human society right now. Some think that the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 crisis has induced millions of people from all walks of life to avoid going back to the old ways of doing things, and just start polluting everything again the way we used to do before the latest coronavirus started killing off millions of people. Some of those same people also think that the anti-racist movement, recently revived in the USA and in many other countries right after the murder of George Floyd, will dovetail with the COVID crisis to also reinforce the popular will not to go back to any of the old ways of doing things. They also point to the ‘Me-Too’ movement that started up in the USA after the Harvey Weinstein scandal of 2017 as another major contributing factor in convincing everyone not to accept any more the kind of thinking that used to be accepted as recently as several years ago.

It is certainly very welcome news indeed for those of us who participated in progressive movements during the 1960s and the 1970s to realize how much the current revival of some of those movements resembles some of the things that were going on fifty years ago. But the worst thing that can happen now in all the progressive movements is that current militants become complacent, and start believing that this time everything is going to be different. As I pointed out in the past few pages, all the reactionary forces in human society are still incredibly strong and will not simply go away and disappear without an enormous fight.

There are currently several hundred thousand people all over the world demonstrating against systemic racism. And the leaders of the anti-racist movement are quite active also, cautioning everyone against the idea of accepting only minor changes in society, such as the partial defunding of police forces and the transfer of some of that money to more progressive ways of dealing with minor lawbreaking. Or thinking that “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions”, like the one set up in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was in power, or the one set up in Canada in 2008 to supposedly “solve the problem” of century-old residential schools for indigenous people, could actually make a major difference. Or the equally inadequate idea of appointing a few thousand upper-class figureheads belonging to minority populations to token government positions, or of appointing a few thousand upper-class women to the executive boards of major corporations.

In every aspect of society, whether it’s the natural environment, racial equality, gender equality, equality between the social classes, equality between all the world’s nations, de-militarizing the whole world, and so on, truly significant, long-lasting progress cannot be any less systemic than the original situation itself. In order to get rid of systemic racism, for example, it’s not a few hundred thousand people demonstrating in several countries, during several months, that will help to get rid of the problem, but hundreds of millions of people demonstrating in every country, all over the world, during several decades. The fact is that there are still far too many people out there who are practising dozens of different kinds of complicity instead, helping the world’s tiny elite of ultra-rich, ultra-powerful people remain in power, by refusing to change any of the old ways of doing things. Sometimes without even realizing the full extent of the negative effects of their reactionary complicity.

What we really need is to merge all the progressive movements into one gigantic, worldwide force capable of imposing an alternative society on all the people in power, and their complicit allies. People all over the world would have to agree to fully support every one of the goals outlined in this blogpost, to get rid of the world’s most important, reactionary ideologies, and to convince their barbarian sponsors to give up trying to dominate everyone else, and the natural environment, once and for all. This would require worldwide, permanent mobilization of hundreds of millions of people, ready to do whatever it takes, during the next several decades,  to bring about all those enormous changes simultaneously.

The least that can be said at this point in time, however, is that the human race does not seem to be anywhere near doing any of those things right now. It is one thing for millions of people to want to get rid of systemic racism, systemic sexism, systemic elitism, systemic extractivism, systemic religious fundamentalism, systemic neoliberalism, systemic imperialism, systemic ethnic exclusivism, systemic neofascism and systemic militarism. It is quite another thing to really accomplish any of those objectives. Or to accomplish all of them together, since each one is just a particular aspect of each other form of reaction.

La “Grande Noirceur” de Jacques Dufresne

Le philosophe québécois Jacques Dufresne a publié un texte de réflexion, “Des soeurs de la Providence à l’État-providence”, dans “Le Devoir” du 21 mai 2020, sur la place des personnes âgées dans la société québécoise. Malheureusement, il a choisi dans son texte de laisser l’impression au lecteur que le Québec est passé directement d’une société dans laquelle les personnes âgées ont été traitées de façon humaniste, par des organisations privées telles que les soeurs de la Providence, à une société totalement bureaucratisée, qui maltraitent à la fois les personnes âgées dans des services publics comme les CHSLD, aussi bien que le personnel soignant qui travaillent dans ces mêmes services. En choisissant de traiter son sujet de cette façon, il fait entièrement abstraction de l’avènement du néolibéralisme dans ce monde, au début des années 1980, et de l’influence grandissante de cette idéologie réactionnaire sur les gouvernement successifs du Québec, ainsi que sur les gouvernements de la plupart des autres pays.

C’est comme si pour lui, l’État-providence n’a jamais été associé au socialisme démocratique, une idéologie relativement progressiste, développée pendant les années 1930 en tant qu’alternative à la fois au laisser-faire capitaliste, d’un côté, et au communisme totalitaire, de l’autre. C’était pendant longtemps une approche beaucoup plus humaniste que l’abnégation totale, imposée aux religieuses (et aux religieux) par les communautés religieuses d’autrefois. Pendant les premières décennies de son existence, l’État-providence, même dans des pays plus ou moins social-démocrates, traitait plutôt bien les personnes en marge du marché de travail, telles que les personnes âgées en perte d’autonomie. Les travailleurs dans ces mêmes services publics avaient des revenus et des conditions de travail acceptables, quand on compare en tout cas, à ce qui se passait autrefois sous le contrôle du laisser-faire capitaliste, qui dominait une bonne partie du monde au dix-neuvième siècle et pendant les premières décennies du vingtième siècle et ce qui se passe encore de nos jours, depuis le retour de ce même laisser-faire, caché sous le vocable du néolibéralisme.

Entre le laisser-faire classique et le néolibéralisme actuel, pendant une courte période centrée sur les “Trente glorieuses” (1945-1975), l’État-providence d’origine social-démocrate s’est imposé dans plusieurs pays, surtout en Occident, tout en étant plus ou moins bien développé d’un pays à l’autre. Au Québec, le gouvernement libéral d’Adélard Godbout (1939-1944), situé entre les deux périodes de pouvoir de Maurice Duplessis qu’on appelle collectivement “la Grande Noirceur” (1936-1939 et 1944-1959), a adopté plusieurs lois sous l’influence de la tendance sociale-démocrate. Mais c’est surtout pendant les deux décennies de la “Révolution tranquille”, version élargie (1960-1980), qu’on est allé beaucoup plus loin dans cette direction. Les réseaux publics du Québec à cette époque, même pendant le retour temporaire au pouvoir de l’Union Nationale, n’étaient pas du tout dans le même capharnaüm que ce qui sont devenus ces mêmes réseaux aujourd’hui, sous le contrôle du néolibéralisme.

Encore pendant la première période de pouvoir du chef libéral Robert Bourassa (1970-1976), très fortement contesté comme il l’était par l’immense mobilisation syndicale des années 1970, le Parti libéral du Québec n’était pas aussi réactionnaire que les gouvernements libéraux le sont devenus par la suite. C’était déjà le cas à partir de la deuxième période de pouvoir de Bourassa (1985-1994), mais de manière beaucoup plus intensive sous Jean Charest (2003-2012) et Philippe Couillard (2014-2018). Pour Jacques Dufresne toutefois, c’est comme si l’avènement du néolibéralisme n’a jamais eu lieu, et que le Québec a sauté tout de suite de la “Grande Noirceur” de Maurice Duplessis à l’hécatombe étatique actuelle. Son interprétation de l’histoire est très dangereuse, surtout pour les gens nés depuis la fin des années 1960, qui n’ont jamais connu l’État-providence plutôt progressiste d’autrefois, avant qu’il soit transformé en bête sauvage par le néolibéralisme. Celui-ci agit depuis le début des années 1980 en tant qu’antichambre du néo-fascisme dans plusieurs pays actuels.

Rappelons que l’idéologie néolibérale est une tentative de retour au libéralisme économique (opposé au nationalisme économique), et à l’absence totale de présence étatique dans le domaine social, qui a caractérisé la période de la révolution industrielle (1780-1880) dans plusieurs pays occidentaux, surtout en Grande-Bretagne. Cette idéologie voulait “libérer” presque complètement toutes les entreprises privées des “interventions” sociales et économiques de l’État qui ont caractérisé plusieurs de ces mêmes pays pendant la période dite mercantiliste, du quinzième aux dix-huitième siècles. Tout comme son prédécesseur, cette idéologie néolibérale prône la domination de l’entreprise privée sur l’État, le libre-échangisme, l’évasion fiscale à la grande échelle, l’opposition féroce à l’existence même de syndicats ouvriers, ainsi que l’ultra-individualisme des philosophes élitistes tels qu’Ayn Rand.

J’ai été moi-même témoin direct des premières années de cette transformation désolante de l’état-providence par le néolibéralisme au Québec, justement au début des années 1980. Pendant la campagne référendaire de 1980, j’ai adhéré pour la première fois au Parti Québécois, pour ensuite devenir un des sept candidats anglophones du PQ pendant les élections de 1981. Bien sûr, comme la plupart de ces candidats anglophones, j’ai perdu mon comté au profit du candidat du Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ), mais j’ai quand même milité au PQ très activement par la suite, surtout au niveau régional (Montréal-Ville-Marie). C’était peu de temps après l’élection de Margaret Thatcher au Royaume-Uni (1979), ainsi que celle de Ronald Reagan aux États-Unis (1980), deux événements politiques qui signalaient le début de la période néolibérale de l’histoire, remplaçant par le fait même les “Trente glorieuses” de la période précédente (1945-1975), singulièrement plus accueillante envers l’État-providence social-démocrate que la période actuelle.

À la fin des années 1970 et le début des années 1980, comme pour bien placer le néolibéralisme en selle au niveau mondial, les banques centrales les plus importantes à l’époque, sous la direction monétariste de la Réserve fédérale américaine, ont lancé de concert leur “Guerre contre l’inflation”, quadruplant leurs taux d’intérêt, d’à peu près 5% (en moyenne) à presque 20% (en moyenne), entre 1979 et 1981, le but étant très explicitement de créer une grande récession mondiale qui mettrait fin à la crise inflationniste des années 1970, beaucoup plus néfaste pour les grands investisseurs que pour le monde ordinaire. Comme plusieurs autres personnes à cette époque, pendant la campagne électorale et après, j’ai publié une vingtaine d’articles dans les journaux, pour dénoncer la Banque du Canada et ses comparses.

Bien sûr, l’inflation a été rapidement maîtrisée par la grande récession mondiale, qui a eu un effet beaucoup plus dévastateur sur les gouvernements que sur les grandes enterprises. En France, par exemple, la nationalisation de plusieurs de ces entreprises, par le gouvernement socialiste de François Mitterrand, à partir de 1981, a été totalement abandonnée en 1983, les organisations du patronat, au monde aussi bien qu’en France, ayant lancé un assaut féroce contre l’économie française jusqu’à la reddition totale de Mitterrand. Au Québec, le ministre des Finances du PQ, Jacques Parizeau, ainsi que le premier ministre, René Lévesque, sous l’effet dévastateur de la récession sur les finances publiques, ont décidé de couper les salaires de 20% pour toutes sortes d’employés du secteur public, mettant fin à l’alliance tacite entre le PQ et les grandes centrales syndicales. En 1983, quand ce gouvernement est allé encore plus loin, en adoptant une loi interdisant même la critique de cette coupure radicale, de la part de ces mêmes employés, j’ai été obligé de quitter le PQ en protestation.

Depuis ce temps-là, de gouvernement en gouvernement, les deux partis politiques partageant le pouvoir à cette époque, le PQ et le PLQ, se sont enfoncés de plus en plus loin dans le marasme du néolibéralisme, le PLQ de façon beaucoup plus radicale que le PQ. Avec le résultat que même si leurs gouvernements n’ont pas décidé de privatiser le secteur public au complet, pour revenir à la “Grande Noirceur” d’autrefois, ils ont quand même réussi à convaincre toute la grande bureaucratie étatique à diriger tout le secteur public (même des entités spéciales comme Hydro-Québec), comme s’ils dirigeaient des compagnies privées. Le résultat de toutes ces années de grand recul étant la situation actuelle, telle que soulignée au début de l’article de Jacques Dufresne, dans laquelle tous les “bénéficiaires” (les patients, les étudiants, etc.) du secteur public, ainsi que tous les “préposés aux bénéficiaires” (en fait, l’ensemble de tous les employés publics), sont traités comme des détenus, ou comme des esclaves salariés. En d’autres mots, le néolibéralisme est vraiment l’antichambre du néo-fascisme; ce n’est pas qu’une métaphore.

Malheureusement, cet article de Jacques Dufresne n’est peut-être pas qu’une mauvaise interprétation de l’histoire du Québec, lancée par un vieux philosophe nostalgique. Deux jours après l’apparition de son article, dans l’édition du 23-24 mai, “Le Devoir” a aussi publié un texte (“Pour l’État, comment gérer la nouvelle normalité?”) de Michel Nadeau, ex-directeur général de l’Institut pour la gouvernance d’organisations publiques et privées, sur la crise actuelle de la COVID-19 au Québec. Il y a quelques commentaires dans son texte qui me semble assez pertinents à la compréhension de la crise actuelle, mais je trouve ça troublant quand même le fait que lui aussi a décrit les deux grands ministères de l’État québécois, la Santé et l’Éducation, des “structures hyper-centralisées” nageant “dans l’opacité bureaucratique”, comme étant des “produits de la Révolution tranquille”. Encore une fois, ça laisse l’impression que leurs caractéristiques actuelles (d’opacité et d’hyper-centralisation) sont en place depuis les années 1960 et 1970 (la Révolution tranquille, élargie), plutôt d’avoir été adoptées sous l’égide du néolibéralisme, à chaque année de plus en plus en selle, mais seulement depuis le début des années 1980.

Deux jours plus tard, le 25 mai, c’était le directeur du “Devoir”, Brian Myles, qui publiait un éditorial, “Coronavirus: Place à des états généraux”, qui, tout comme l’article précédent, est aussi plein de commentaires pertinents sur la crise actuelle, mais qui répètent aussi des propos similaires au sujet de la Révolution tranquille. Dans cet éditorial, Myles a cité le texte de  Nadeau, concernant “le manque d’agilité” et “la complexité inutile” des Ministères de la Santé et de l’Éducation, ainsi que celui de Dufresne, concernant “le constat d’un échec des idéaux de la Révolution tranquille”. Myles a aussi reproduit dans son éditorial la question posée par Dufresne dans son texte, “Comment, après avoir bénéficié des services gratuits des religieuses pendant des siècles de pauvreté, en avons-nous été réduits, devenus riches, à une pénurie d’infirmières et de préposés rémunérés?”.

Pour moi, le problème principal du texte de Dufresne, tout comme des textes de Nadeau et de Myles, c’est d’avoir laissé tomber le rôle du néolibéralisme dans tout cela, entre la fin de la Révolution tranquille, élargie (1960-1980), et l’arrivée de la crise actuelle. Pour bien décrire ce qui est arrivé au Québec, ainsi qu’au monde entier, par rapport à la “gestion sociale” de l’État dans la crise actuelle, il ne faut pas laisser tomber l’héritage plutôt positif de la Révolution tranquille au Québec, ni celui aussi relativement positif des “Trente glorieuses”, dans plusieurs autres pays, surtout en Occident.

C’est le fait qu’on a accepté que le néolibéralisme nous éloigne complètement de l’État-providence d’origine, et du socialisme démocratique au grand complet, qu’on soit tombé dans le néo-fascisme de l’État actuel. Les fauteurs de la crise sont tout ceux qui appuient le néolibéralisme depuis la fin des années 1970, en Occident aussi bien qu’un peu partout dans le monde (y compris en Chine).

A pox on all your houses

This is the same title that I used about fifteen years ago, inside one of my self-published books, to describe my rejection of all the world’s most important ideologies, whether religious or secular. Those that are always being used to justify the rotten behaviour of the tiny coterie of powerful people and their hangers-on, towards all the world’s much more numerous, but considerably less powerful people. In the original version of this proverb, the “pox” was a disease (such as smallpox or chicken pox) that was supposed to be visited upon both sides (or “houses”) of any particularly ridiculous controversy between two equally obnoxious opponents. In my version, it applies especially to such thoroughly atavistic, and inter-related, ideologies as neoliberalism and neofascism, that have become more and more hegemonic with every passing year. Since they were first introduced into the world, together, by the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite allies, and his libertarian friends from the US empire (“the Chicago boys”). Thereby signalling an end to the worldwide, anti-fascist entente that had been formed during the Second World War.

With the onset of the current, even more worldwide, coronavirus crisis, the pox that I was referring to during the opening years of this century has stopped being only a metaphor and has become very much a part of reality itself. My original idea was to use that metaphor to also express my disdain for such other once-powerful ideologies as totalitarian communism. During the Cold War (1945-1991), that ideology was supposed to have been promoted by all the ruling bureaucracies of the Soviet bloc, including the USSR (1922-1991) and, at least originally, the PRC (People’s Republic of China). None of those regimes, however, ever practised anything remotely resembling the dictionary definition of what communism is supposed to be all about. So far as I can tell, all of them have now been replaced by governments combining support for the selfsame neoliberalism and neofascism that are also being practised these days by all the governments that used to belong to the former “Western” bloc of nations, led by the same US empire that supported Pinochet. Talk about ideological convergence!

Not only that, but the Chinese regime, which still bears its deliberately misleading title, adopted away back in 1949, has now become the original home of the COVID-19 virus, that was officially recognized as such only a few months ago. The worldwide pandemic most certainly could have been prevented if the Chinese government had really wanted to close down, as some ruling party officials apparently tried to do, all the wild-animal meat-markets that have apparently existed for centuries in the most poverty-stricken regions of that country. People all over the world are now suffering from the effects of that virus, and not just in China, either because they became sick themselves, or because they know someone who was stricken by the disease. The ever-increasing numbers of dead people have been deliberately under-reported in dozens of different countries, the overall number of victims greatly increasing death rates all over the world, especially for older people like myself. Not only directly from the virus itself, but also indirectly through the deliberate, worldwide, negligence of normal treatment of all the other diseases, to make way in the overworked hospitals for those stricken by the pandemic.

Literally billions of people have also had their lives turned upside down as a result of all the efforts at containing the disease, particularly through mass confinement, which has also had a devastating effect on the entire world economy. Dozens of countries have racked up enormous government deficits and greatly increased long-term debt burdens, that will undoubtedly plague millions of younger people’s lives for decades to come. The world’s most vulnerable categories of the population are already suffering more than anyone else, as they always do in every such crisis, with the result that most parts of the world have been set back several decades in their development strategies. Wiping out any of the gains that some of them may have managed to make over the past forty years, in spite of the constantly worsening effects of  neoliberalism and neofascism in almost every country. All in all, the virus has brought with it a major escalation in popular misery in every part of today’s world. Hardly the sort of thing that a self-described “communist” party was supposed to have been bringing about, not only at home but everywhere else as well.

As a result, all those people who want to blame China for having made a monstrous error in its socio-economic policies are entirely justified in so doing, as long as they do not succumb to any of the exotic conspiracy theories about how the Chinese rulers are supposedly using the virus to help them take over control of the entire world. To be sure, they do seem to be trying to take over the world, as soon as possible, but I doubt very much that they would also be dumb enough to try to control something as eminently uncontrollable as a virus. In any case, ultra-stupid leaders of many other countries, such as the one who runs the USA, have recently taken to blaming all of their own problems on the PRC, the “Trumpster” (rhymes with “dumpster”) himself threatening to cut off all ties with China. Which would be exceedingly difficult to do these days, given the fact that almost total reliance on China’s manufacturing industries was, and still is, the central characteristic of the joint neoliberal/neofascist alliance between those two empires, now more than forty years old. That was originally designed not only to get rid of a serious rival, the already declining Soviet empire, once and for all, but more importantly I suppose, to avoid paying “inflated wages” to millions of supposedly “unpatriotic” US workers.

Just as ridiculous as any Trump tweet are all the knee-jerk reactions of ordinary, anti-Chinese racists all over the world, including those here in North America, who stop “Chinese-looking” people in the street every day to berate them, even in some cases to physically attack them, in “retaliation” for what they have supposedly done to the world. Very conveniently refusing to realize that none of those Chinese-looking people outside China, nor for that matter any of the real Chinese people inside China, who do not belong in any way to that country’s very small circle of rulers, can possibly be blamed for doing anything of the sort. In a totalitarian dictatorship, and there are several dozen of them scattered all over the world, every significant act of every citizen falls under the exclusive control of that country’s ruling class, no matter which ideology it is officially supposed to be upholding.

Canadian rock musician Bryan Adams was also taken to task recently for having posted an anti-Chinese rant on social media, using a lot of swear words, for which he has since abundantly apologized. He has nevertheless been denounced by many other social-media addicts as a racist for so doing, as reported in the “Montreal Gazette” (May 13, 2020). Which is true enough on the face of it, just as long as everyone acknowledges, after all, that a straightforward critique of Chinese policy toward so-called “wet markets”, minus any exaggerations and any swear words, is not racist in and of itself. Racism does not include repeating something that most scientists in the world, including most of those in China, believe to be true. It would be just as racist to avoid telling the truth about Chinese policy merely in order to make dictators like Xi Jinping feel good about themselves. Racism, after all, consists just as much in attributing something good to some particular ethnic group, but also something bad to some other group, for any non-scientific reason based on exclusivism.

In Québec, for example, it would be racist to claim that China is solely responsible for all the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in any of our long-term care centres. Rather than pointing out that the virus would not have succeeded in killing off nearly as many thousands of people if succeeding Québec governments had not set up a very dangerous, poorly-run, disgusting system of (non-existent) care based almost exclusively on the profit motive. Not only in the horrendous, privately-run centres but also in the public ones, that were supposed to copy the private system as much as possible by doing everything they could to avoid any cost over-runs or deficits. Thereby turning the social-democratic welfare state into a neoliberal/neofascist state instead. Canada’s federal government also contributed to those deaths by spending a much smaller percentage of money nowadays than they used to be spending a couple of decades ago (twenty percent instead of fifty percent), to help the provinces pay for their ever more expensive health and social services.

In the current crisis, people born since 1965 cannot remember a time when governments were supposed to be kind to ordinary people, and to protect them from the excesses of capitalism, rather than doing exactly the opposite. So those younger people (most of the entire world population nowadays) have a tendency to think that it makes no difference if all the world’s old and sick people, living in long-term “care” centres, are in private or public institutions. They also think the same sort of thing about public or private day-care centres, or public or private schools, and so on. For the simple reason, that since the joint onslaught of neoliberalism and neofascism, most governments tend to treat people under their care just as poorly as any profit-making enterprise ordinarily does.

None of that, however, can be used by the Chinese government to legitimize what seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign inside Canada, as well as inside many other countries, to convince everyone outside China that any time that anyone criticizes the Chinese leadership for any reason at all, those critics are necessarily guilty of racism. Instead, what everyone ought to be doing in this kind of controversy is to honestly try to tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” all the time. Not just in the fake-news fashion that US supporters of Donald Trump are always doing, while pretending to be doing exactly the opposite, but for real this time. Not all criticism of China is necessarily racist, just like not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic; some of it is, and some of it is not, it all depends on what is being said and in what context. Accusing the USA of practising imperialism because of its ultra-domineering behaviour, in many different parts of the world, is every bit as justified as accusing the PRC of also adopting imperialist behaviour. Even if in so doing it has not yet killed quite as many ordinary people (at least outside of China proper) as the USA has in recent decades.

In the same way that there is nothing racist about criticizing Muslim terrorism, or any other kind of religious terrorism, for which the number of dead victims also keeps constantly increasing, even though the number of victims being created by the virus these days may turn out to be a lot greater. Likewise, criticizing fundamentalist Muslim women for wearing religious clothing that deliberately sends an anti-feminist message, promoting what some people call voluntary slavery, is perfectly legitimate, even if the wearing of such clothing is obviously not nearly as violent as terrorist attacks always are. Nor is covering one’s face for atavistic, religious reasons at all the same as covering one’s face for rational, sanitary reasons during a pandemic.

In other words, neofascist behaviour is neofascist behaviour, no matter who does it. Reactionary people who deliberately ignore social distancing nowadays, whether they do it for religious reasons or for ultra-individualist reasons, are not contributing to any worthwhile cause. Criticizing people for such anti-social behaviour ought not to be condemned, it ought to be praised instead, since it is in everyone’s best interest. Let’s get real here. Those who enjoy running around, like some ultra-conservatives in the USA, proclaiming that “We are NOT all in this together”, are making the same kind of mistake (although not always with the same horrible consequences) that the Chinese big-shots made when they refused to shut down those wild-animal meat-markets, in the first place.

A lot of eternally optimistic people are also saying over and over again these days that we humans ought to be taking advantage of the current crisis, which is to say using the pandemic as an opportunity to solve many of our other long-lasting problems once and for all. For example, they want all the world’s governments to join together in promoting much more useful international cooperation than ever before, which would include putting an end to such abominations as the several dozen regional wars still going on in various parts of the world. As well as abandoning racist attitudes toward the ever-increasing numbers of people fleeing particularly devastating forms of imposed deprivation. While at the same time allowing all the world’s governments, even the most impoverished ones, to build up thoroughly adequate, nationalized stocks of appropriate medical equipment for the remainder of this pandemic, as well as for any future ones.

Those optimists, however, never seem to get around to explaining how exactly we are supposed to accomplish such major feats nowadays, not only the ones identified above but also all the other ones. Such as totally reversing the long-lasting trend toward environmental degradation of the natural world, COVID-19 being a particularly devastating consequence of that same degradation. Or reversing the always more horrendously huge income gap between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. Do those optimists really believe that all the world’s most important problems really came about by accident and were not actually put into place on purpose by the world’s richest, most powerful and most influential people? Do they genuinely expect such people to just sit idly by in the near future and watch the world’s governments, somehow completely liberated from the neoliberal/neofascist tandem, put into place the exact opposite of what the world’s most powerful people have been trying so hard to accomplish for so long?

It seems to me much more likely that all the world’s most antediluvian leaders, not just the political leaders but those in every other sphere as well, will decide instead to profit from the current world crisis to get rid of any existing vestiges of democracy, or social equality, or feminism, or resistance to racism and imperialism, that still persists in various different places. Why would neofascist governments like the one in Colombia, or neoliberal corporations like Amazon, abandon their tried-and-true strategies from the recent past, in order to adopt completely different policies instead? What’s in it for them? Where is the extremely well-organized, worldwide, afraid-of-nothing, human liberation movement springing up in every possible country, that would be capable of getting rid of so many different kinds of oppressors once and for all? And replacing them with what kind of new world order that would be capable of resisting every possible urge to replace the old oppressors with just another repeat performance of exactly the same sort of thing all over again, as already happened to the world’s only theoretically communist, democratic-socialist and national-liberation movements?

In order to do something really different on our next attempt at changing the world, we have to realize that there is more to being a “good neoliberal/neofascist reactionary” than just the reasons that have so far been listed for all the different kinds of ultra-elitist behaviour. For example, the current worldwide income gap between a very few people now “earning” 100 million US dollars per day, and a very large number of people still earning only one or two dollars per day, was not just caused, as is so often claimed, by extreme greed. In my opinion, all those people who consider themselves to be much more important than others are really searching for the immense shot of dopamine (apparently controlled by the striatum) that comes only from deliberately mistreating as many other human beings as possible, as much as humanly possible, over an extended period of time. In other words, a form of poorly-disguised sadism, on a world scale.

As a result, the deliberately reactionary people operating in the economic sphere of activity (otherwise known as big business) could not have been expected to be satisfied for long by the relatively more limited rates of profit that were available to them back in the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975), prior to the onslaught of neoliberalism and neofascism. Especially when they were being taxed by dozens of different governments at a much higher level than they have been more recently. They desperately wanted to get back to the rates of all-for-themselves profit that they used to enjoy during the (partly fictitious) “gilded age” of total economic liberalism (laissez-faire) that presumably prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. They were not at all satisfied by the “neomercantilist” expansion of government “interventions” into the capitalist economy, and society, that took place in varying degrees between the 1880s and the 1980s, under the influence of inter-imperialist colonial rivalry, the two world wars, the Great Depression and the most important military interventions of the Cold War (Korea, Vietnam, etc.).

A similar kind of analysis should also be entered into when social scientists try to explain other forms of planned atavism on the part of any other sections of the minuscule minorities that we choose to call “world leaders”, each in its respective sphere of activity. (Which, as all keen observers of society realize, are not at all so neatly separated from every other sphere as those analytical requirements would seem to dictate.) Political leaders of entire countries, for example, are not just interested in extreme political control over their respective societies for reasons of efficiency, or to promote excellence, or any of the other b. s. reasons constantly being offered up by the world’s most successful dictators (the ones who don’t always appear to be dictators). They will use whatever means that different societies make available to them, in order to get into power and to stay in power forever.

In countries using some form of “more-than-one-party on the ballot” electoral system, that could mean manipulating millions of under-educated voters into believing that some particularly stupid elitist individual will help them fight against “the liberal swamp” currently running society. Even when that individual in fact merely represents the swampiest section of the same ruling elite, rather than any genuine alternative. Donald Trump’s neofascist electoral slogan, “Make America great again” (that he borrowed from ultra-right-wing agitator Steve Bannon), also seems to have inspired dozens of other political leaders all over the world, especially in countries that have always avoided copying the USA’s particularly uncertain kind of electoral system. Who are all adopting very similar slogans anyway, such as “Make China great again”, “Make Russia great again”, “Make Iran great again”, “Make Egypt great again”, “Make Hungary great again”, “Make India great again”, “Make Brazil great again”, and so on and so forth, all over the world.

Even most national liberation movements, that initially promised not to hog all the social-development funds in the country exclusively for the people at the top, also ended up instead trying to make Angola, Algeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and dozens of other such countries “great again”. Every country currently being run by an exceptionally narrow-minded political elite, that does not want to run the risk of sharing power at some point, even with other people very similar to themselves, has found its own version of that Trump slogan quite useful indeed. None of the world’s politicians these days seem the least bit interested in doing anything at all to bring about real social change. Not now, not ever.

To be sure, all the most important chieftains of the world’s most important private enterprises, such as Jeff Bezos from Amazon or Jack Ma from Alibaba (whether or not they are still officially running the giant companies that they initially founded), are at least as elitist and at least as anti-social, as any of the political leaders directly or indirectly referred to in the above list of countries. They all came into power, and managed to stay in power for a very long time, pretty much in the same way as did the Mark Zuckerberg character who was depicted in the movie about Facebook, which is to say without being unduly influenced by any considerations having to do with such “sissy slogans” as “fair play” and “due diligence”. The most successful of those “business politicians” being the ones who, once they have clawed their way to the top, manage to protect their powerful positions by seeking even greater adulation from the world’s ordinary proletarians. Such as playing God by becoming “one of the world’s leading philanthropists”, and giving as much money to their favourite worthy causes as most large governments are capable of giving.

This brings us to all those other world leaders also playing God in the original sense, running all the world’s major religions as a kind of necessary ideological back-up for making sure that billions of people all over the world are tricked into believing that the heavens themselves are requiring them to support their political leaders and their business leaders, simultaneously. Such as the hundreds of millions of evangelical Christians in countries like the USA, adhering to such popular slogans as “God helps those who help themselves”. Which is a kind of pentecostal obfuscation to the effect that it is perfectly okay in everyday life to avoid treating “thy neighbour as thyself”, and to get rich at other people’s expense instead, just so long as one nevertheless believes in the right kind of Christianity and contributes once a week to missionary efforts aimed at spreading “the Word”. Not to forget interpreting certain passages from the Bible literally, such as the one about supporting Israel no matter what, even if the people running that country these days could not possibly represent in any viable way the Israeli people living there back in ancient times.

Every other major religion in this world is also run by the same kind of people, who pick up on dozens of very different kinds of supernatural myths invented hundreds or thousands of years ago in dozens of different cultures, and attempt to use those ancient or medieval myths to direct millions of other people’s lives nowadays. Every ultra-right-wing political orientation, and every voluntary-slave support group for every form of private or state capitalism all over the world, depends on the capacity that religious leaders possess to constantly reinterpret age-old belief systems in creative ways. To make sure that billions of ordinary people can be accused of some form of blasphemy toward Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism, or Hinduism, or Sikhism, or Buddhism, or Confucianism, or Shintoism, or animism, etc., whenever they “stray from the paths of righteousness” and end up refusing to kowtow to their country’s, or their culture’s, designated leaders.

From a moral standpoint at least, all these different kinds of official behaviour could perhaps be seen as a kind of modern, or social application, of the deliberate, “legacy”, slaughtering of the world’s largest mammals. That was apparently carried out by our hunting and gathering ancestors (according to such well-known historians as Yuval Noah Harari), in practically every region gradually occupied by human beings during the first 300 000 years of our existence as a species. From a social point of view, that is to say directed largely against other human beings, it even more closely resembles the attitudes of the various ruling classes that have lorded it over the “inferior” classes (slaves, peasants, artisans, workers and so on), for the past 6000 years, in all the urban-based societies known as “civilizations”. That were gradually set up, in most parts of the world, following the agricultural revolution and, much later on, the industrial revolution, as depicted in such monumental works as Chris Harman’s 728-page reference work, “A people’s history of the world”, published in 1999. In other words, it looks like the sort of organized sadism that I was describing earlier has been going on, although not in such a sophisticated fashion as in more recent periods of history, for quite a long time.

In any case, it seems to me that the world’s most atavistic political, economic and cultural leaders nowadays, promoting such ideologies as neoliberalism and neofascism in various different ways, are certainly the most important people exhibiting anti-social behaviour these days. But they are definitely not the only deplorable people behaving badly in this world, just because they seem to possess an over-active striatum, running amok chasing dopamine fixes all the time, in a particularly determined fashion. There are also quite a large number of other very well-known people chasing fame every bit as obsessively as the top-ranking politicians and the big-shot investors promoting shareholder-rights. This other group includes highly successful singers, actors, artists and players performing in the world’s richest professional sports teams, who spend a great deal more of their time self-promoting than they spend honing their craft. Some of these people also use philanthropy as a particularly useful method of self-aggrandizement, but most of them just sit around pretending to dislike their favourite paparazzi instead.

The exaggerated search for dopamine, at all costs, also applies to dozens of other categories of harmful human behaviour, including self-inflicted harm, which takes place more or less equally in all the different social classes. Such as in the unfortunate cases of extremely obese people, some of them weighing hundreds of kilograms, who keep on shovelling food into their mouths all the time, no matter what the outcome. Or, even more obviously, those other unfortunates who are constantly consuming large quantities of psychotropic drugs (appropriately called “dope”), quite often giving themselves (accidentally or otherwise) a fatal overdose of some toxic substance, or mixture of substances. Drugs like alcohol and tobacco are also over-consumed in huge quantities by many other unfortunate people, in spite of all the publicity about moderation that many public agencies are constantly dishing out.

Self-inflicted harm, however, is definitely not the only kind of sadism practised by people belonging to any one, or to all of the social classes. As has been pointed out recently in hundreds of news reports, the confinement strategies used against the coronavirus have also had the unintended consequence of setting up an ideal situation for particularly violent people, almost all of them male, to beat up, terrorize and otherwise dominate the women in their lives. Sometimes some of those women in the human pecking order will pass on some of that violence to their children as well, or even originate it in some cases, but in most cases it is the ape-men themselves who also beat up on the children.

Many of those dominant males are simultaneously taking advantage of this unforeseen opportunity to engage in sexual sadism as well, even more than they were already doing beforehand. These sexual sadists are probably the category among the various, socially undifferentiated, kinds of rotten behaviour that resembles the most the socially dominant categories previously mentioned. Especially the world’s most important private-capitalist and state-capitalist founders, and practitioners, of neoliberalism and neofascism. In the sense that sexual sadists do not like their victims to participate in any form of (imposed) sexually related desire, but instead insist on mistreating their victims to the greatest degree possible, because that is what gives them by far the greatest pleasure. Domination is much more important to people with a severely over-developed sense of self-worth than is mere exploitation, because it helps them “prove” (at least from their jaundiced point of view) that their victims are much less important than they themselves obviously are, and therefore “deserve” to be dominated and exploited to the nth degree.

This is the kind of overweening elitism that is being promoted whenever establishment organizations focus on the search for what they call “excellence”. For them, promoting excellence does not mean just performing ordinary tasks in an exceptional way. It really means convincing other people not to fight against their oppressors, but instead to join forces with their illustrious leaders and to “solve” all of humanity’s problems by supporting their betters fully. Using consensual conformism and deliberately avoiding critical thinking, except when a truncated form of it can be reserved for the denunciation of “misleading”, anti-elitist ideas.

An excellent example of this sort of thing, during the current coronavirus crisis, is to treat everyone on the front lines of the fight against the virus, such as nurses and orderlies working in long-term care centres, as heroes. Their job, helping older people who have been infected with the virus as well as with such previously existing conditions as diabetes, then becomes not just a job but an outstanding example of devotion and bravery, “in the face of death”, sometimes “making the supreme sacrifice” for their nation. Which means treating those front-line workers in exactly the same way as the millions of actually rather ordinary, conscripted soldiers were treated during and after the Second World War. Who, most of the time, were not heroes at all and in fact survived the war by getting out of the way as often as they could.

It is quite similar in many ways to the Stakhanovite movement that started up in the USSR during the forced industrialization of the 1930s, when a worker called Alexey Stakhanov out-performed his assigned quota of factory work, and was then turned into a model “hero of socialism” by the Soviet regime. In other words, normal, regular work was considered insufficient, and people were encouraged instead to develop (paradoxically) anti-social, anti-union behaviour by deliberately working much harder than everyone else. Thereby making it possible for the regime to completely ignore all its bureaucratic failures by relying on “heroes” to fill the gap between what their system was normally capable of doing (over and above just staying in power), and what their system had to do to ensure group survival. Not to mention simultaneously making all the ordinary workers look like slackers by comparison.

Curiously enough, the over-performance of all these public-relations-created, long-term care-centre heroes in the current crisis, as well as all the war-time soldier heroes and the Soviet worker heroes of days gone by, also has a lot in common with the ultra-individualist philosophy of extreme reactionaries like Ayn Rand. Currently represented in Donald Trump’s USA by such well-known libertarian senators as the conveniently-named Rand Paul. The point being that we are all supposed to be solving the problems created by COVID-19, as well as by the ecological crisis, the economic crisis and the inequality crisis, etc., by adopting heroic ultra-individualism and relying on our favourite “guardian angels” to do whatever is necessary. Including dying off in great numbers if need be, to offset all the problems created by neoliberalism and neofascism over the past several decades.

This false-heroic attitude, relying on someone else’s heroism, is just as much a part of the strategy always being adopted by ultra-elitist individualists in their constantly reiterated tendency to always blame everyone on the bottom of society for everything that is going wrong. “Hit them while they’re down!” means not giving any more public money to “problem people” of all sorts. Such as the chronically poor, those exhibiting the wrong skin colour, especially poor, often non-white, women with way too many children, some of them coming from unknown fathers. Or alcoholics, or the mentally ill, or the chronically unemployed, or those billions of people happening to live in any one of Donald Trump’s “sh—hole countries”, in short anyone caught “forcing polite society” to bail them all out. Which, of course, serves to hide the fact that the top of society is dominated by legions of money-grubbing, tax-evading champions of slavery and, when that is not available, champions of paying the lowest wages possible to their workers. Legions that are dominated at the very tip-top by the leading denizens of the “financial services industry”, located as far away as possible from any social utility. Just the word “social” all by itself makes those excellent people’s skin crawl.

These exceptionally “heroic” ideas all being delivered to the ignorant masses every day by authority figures in government, or by senior bureaucrats in the health and education “industries” and or by the CEOs of large, impersonal corporations, in the kind of double-speak that comes from continually consulting public-relations and communications experts. So that all the world’s most important messages, concerning the COVID crisis and all the other related crises, are always coming at people with real information constantly mixed in with “little white lies”, half-truths, insinuations and conspiratorial scenarios, in an immense jumble of contradictory facts and figures. Each one of those authority figures at the end of the day telling as many fibs as Donald Trump is capable of tweeting in an average night.

In the midst of a pandemic of this importance, one would expect even the world’s most intransigent individualists, at least those at the top, to take a more intelligent approach to what is happening to the world that they own, or at least that they feel they own. The same pro-business conservatives are always arguing that if any private company behaved like any (fictitious) government agency in some particular situation, it would go bankrupt, or its executives would be sent to jail. Curiously, however, the folks from big business have themselves been behaving a lot like the fictitious government agency in that oft-repeated, pro-business argument.

Because they completely ignored all the warnings issued over and over again by the catastrophe experts from the pro-business Davos organization, warning them over the past few years that they should be preparing to deal with upcoming epidemics, and pandemics, in the near future. The same type of warnings were also repeated by the USA’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as by well-informed individuals like Bill Gates. Most of the people at the top nevertheless continued to apply neoliberal, just-in-time strategies for the production of everything, including letting most basic medical equipment be produced exclusively in China. It turns out that the pro-business people are being hoisted on their own petard, having behaved every bit as stupidly as the fictitious government agency in their own anti-government argument!

Not to mention the fact that any discussion about epidemics and pandemics always includes dozens of references to what is known as “herd immunity”, during which human beings act like any other animals by developing, or not developing, sufficient antibodies to provide people with protection against such diseases. Among the world’s most important big-business people, there are quite a few of them who are successful ranchers, who presumably know a thing or two about herd immunity, just by taking care of huge herds of semi-domesticated animals. Those ranchers make a profit out of exploiting those herds not just during every quarter-year (just-in-time) but instead year after year, decade after decade.

If we want to be really cynical about all this, we could therefore presume that the world’s most important big businesses ought to be treating their customers, in this case human beings, at least as well any other large herd of animals. To be sure, capitalism, whether private or state, does indeed seem to be a horrible, inhumane system, but even from a strictly capitalist point of view, one would feel that economically-enlightened, big-time investors would somehow be able to treat their human herds (the rest of us) just well enough that we would not start dying off as quickly as in the current crisis. Or becoming so afraid of dying that we start running around ruining the world economy with “stupid, anti-capitalist” ideas about social distancing. After all, we have to presume that the majority of the world’s big-time investors are not stupid as Donald Trump, whose debts have become larger than his personal fortune, and who therefore needs to remain president of the USA long enough to get his own business ventures back into a profitable situation.