Bogus revolutions

The first clear sign of neoliberal ascendency was Margaret Thatcher’s electoral victory in 1979, and the trend was confirmed the following year by Ronald Reagan’s election as president. Both professed the conviction that market forces were the only tool for an efficient production of goods and services. They both set about unpicking government control of the economy, and their labours were pursued by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. There was resistance by employees and trade unions, but the new ideology was largely carried by the general willingness for change that had swept the 1960s and 70s when, among many other things, colour suddenly replaced black and white. This new optical perspective demanded a different world, and flower-power somehow mutated into a frenetic pursuit of wealth. Profit was the only incentive and unprofitability was condemned. A condemnation aimed at government departments, social services and state owned industries. Everything that could be was sold off to the private sector, administrations were downsized, and the fundamentals of education, health and housing were no longer assumed to be an egalitarian right.

For about three decades neoliberalism was successful. It overran China and the Soviet Union, most of Asia and Latin America, and turned Central America, the Middle East and Africa into war zones. World wealth multiplied, but it trickled down so slowly that the gap between rich and poor got wider and deeper. Then, in 2008, the financial machine came to a grinding halt. Banks had granted doubtful credit in vast quantities, packaged it up and sold it on, and those loans were defaulting en masse. Central banks and governments came to the rescue with the nation’s and the tax-payer’s cash, by creating and borrowing more money. This got the machine going again, but at a much slower rate than before the breakdown. As for the cause of the chaos, all the blame was put on rogue activities. The system itself was perfectly valid, and had to be saved because “There Is No Alternative”. This discourse was propagated year after year, and people became increasingly distrustful as their living conditions deteriorated. They felt they were being lied to and cheated, by representatives who had abandoned the common good for private privileges.

The historian Albert Mathiez defined revolution as the combination of institutional changes and changes in property rights. This of course applies to the overthrow of absolute monarchy and the end of feudalism. But it also means that a future revolution must also have this double objective. When there is only institutional change on offer (drain the swamp!), the proposed revolution is reactionary, populist and nationalist. It was the revolution of Italian Fascists, German National-Socialists and the Spanish Phalanx, among countless other examples. It is being proposed again by 21^st century demagogues, those “new brooms” that are manifesting themselves everywhere and winning elections. Almost a century separates us from Mussolini’s march on Rome (1922), and the world is in a very different place. But the regard for property and the disrespect of institutions are symptoms of a recurrent malaise. When capitalism flounders after a period of rapid growth, the social ascension of the middle classes is interrupted and goes into reverse. The political elites, who claimed to have brought about the economic expansion, are then blamed for its reversal. Eight years after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the middle classes have fallen deeper in debt, their better paid employments are disappearing and they see no end to their woes. As there is no alternative to the system of property, those who govern it must be at fault. Their corruption is behind the disaster.

Governments always claim they know best, all the more loudly when they are elected. However, mounting debts and falling incomes are proof of government ineptitude, or of government disdain. As the dominant discourse of absolute competence drowns out all dissident voices (see Yellen’s humming and hawing over the quarter of a point), it can only be elitist contempt. This realisation brings demagogues to power. “It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system.” Hannah Arendt (1). The power of cupidity has bought off and silenced any suggestion of a different future, of a commonwealth. So popular aspirations are drawn by a vociferous leader who says he cares for the “deplorable” throng. History has continuously repeated itself, because the accumulation of wealth has always been limited in extent by technology. This time the limits are the planet itself, and nothing imaginable can extend it.

1. The Origins of Totalitarianism, part III, chapter 10, I. The masses, p.311-12, Harcourt, Inc. and:

http://www.cscd.osaka-u.ac.jp/user/rosaldo/101010OTHA.htm