Free or equal

To resist oppression by a rich, ideologically powerful and well-armed minority, the people can only offer their combined strength. As individuals they are no match for the powers that be, but in sufficient numbers they are unstoppable. So preventing people from organising has been a major task for oligarchies past and present. The only organisations they tolerate are those they control. All others are hindered or repressed. Yet the tide of organising ebbs and flows. A high point was reached in the decades following WW2. Conscript wars have a levelling effect on society, and they highlight its dependence on the people as a whole. Everyone can see who is getting the job done. But conscript wars have since been phased out.

In the US mass organisations brought an advance in civil rights and helped bring an end to America’s war in South-East Asia. In Europe they were retrograde, trying to resist the change from coal to petroleum and nuclear, and the end of textile industries outsourced to Asia. But the 1960s had brought colours and consumerism, which made these survivorships of the Industrial Revolution seem even more obsolete. By the 1980s labour organisations could no longer act as propagandists for a changed society, and they restricted their functions to negotiating working conditions and pay. In Europe the link up with soviet style socialism helped the downfall of labour unions. In the US organised crime may have played a role. But the main culprit on both sides of the Atlantic was organised capital.

America’s successful War of Independence and the multiple regime changes in France had shown that the divine right of kings and imperial dominion were not the only possible forms of government. The 19^th century was inspired by the idea that society could be free and equal, though the two concepts are contradictory. So the freedom of a few to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of everyone else imposed itself. The resulting inequality grew to a peak round about 1900, and was wrecked by total war. From the horrors of WW1 came a new regime that chose equality over freedom, the equality of an army with the absolute power of command. Then WW2 brought America out of the doldrums of recession and led to an East-West divide between “equality” and “freedom”.

During the big freeze of the Cold War, freedom in the West could not abide demands for equality, and movements that tried were infiltrated while their members were imprisoned and murdered. In the East equality could not abide demands for freedom, and those that tried were subjected to a quick or a slow execution. Since 1991 the freedom party has imposed its rules everywhere, and equality no longer has a voice. Freedom is king, and equality is reduced to begging for a trickle. However, a contradiction cannot be resolved by one side dominating the other. This merely increases tensions and is the path to catastrophe. Contradictions can only be muddled out by give and take. They require a synthesis, or perhaps a hybridisation. The struggle between freedom and equality is back where it was a century or so ago, with obscene wealth alongside heart-wrenching poverty. This state of affairs could persist, or even get worse, except for that other duality: profit and debt. When the poor have been pressed dry, to get more riches the rich, individuals and nations, must plunder one another. This is the overload that brought down the colonial empires of yesterday, and is undermining today’s financial empires. There is no room left for a significant expansion of debt, a debt that actually increases demand, rather than just rolling over past debts and their interest. Governments, corporations and households are still borrowing, but its effect on production and consumption is dwindling fast.

Freedom has totally dominated equality, but debt fuelled profits are stagnating. The freedom to accumulate wealth has reached a summit, where the planet’s richest half-dozen own as much as the poorest half of humanity, which is more than half a billion to one (01/22/18. I was misled, the latest numbers give a ratio of 42:3.7bn, which is only eighty-eight million to one). But this stupendous accumulation of wealth does not only depend on freedom dominating equality. It also needs a financial system that turns promises into money. The people’s debts fuel the accumulation of profits, and that is the weak point of the current kleptocracy. When new debts are just compensating past debts that have reached their terms, profits are no longer funded. And that seems increasingly the case. When the source of profits shrinks, capital loses its unity, and conflicts arise along national lines. And the people, having lost all faith in social change, are swept along into frenzied flag-waving. Who would dare stand up today and claim they have a dream, or ask everyone to imagine, with so many more guns and bullets around? And, anyway, who has the stature to make it ring true? The French revolutionaries of old added Fraternity to the ideals of Liberty and Equality. It is the idealised solution to the contradiction of the other two notions. In a fraternal community, liberty and equality could probably exist side by side. But in a highly competitive society, where reigns a pseudo-Darwinian struggle for life, the sisterhood and brotherhood of man have all but disappeared. With hind sight, John Lennon’s imagination was very far out.

For more on debt and profit see:

http://lelezard.blogspot.fr/2017/09/rosa-luxemburg.html

Notre-Dame-des-Landes

Toujours plus de la même chose, alors qu’il devient évident que l’humanité subit un changement de paradigme. Depuis un siècle le produit mondial a doublé assez régulièrement tous les vingt ans. Le denier doublement a été possible grâce aux grands pays émergents, Brésil, Russie, Inde, Chine et Afrique du Sud, qui ont réanimé les vieilles nations industrielles en leur cédant des parts du plus gros gâteau. Mais un nouveau doublement supposerait l’émergence de deux nouveaux BRICA en même temps. Cette impossibilité signifie que dorénavant toute croissance significative se fera au détriment d’autrui, et que le produit planétaire va stagner. Ceux qui promettent que la richesse de tous va augmenter comme avant se trompent eux-mêmes, ou cherchent à tromper ceux qui les écoutent.

L’autre changement concerne le dépérissement de l’écosystème planétaire provoqué par la dissémination massive de produits de synthèse et les émissions de gazes à effet de serre qui sont en train de réchauffer les océans et de modifier le climat. Il s’agit ici d’une accélération au lieu d’un ralentissement. Des effets cumulatifs se manifestent. La fonte du permafrost et le dégel des fonds de l’océan Arctique dégagent du méthane en quantités difficilement mesurables, mais potentiellement énormes. Tandis que le cocktail de pesticides, d’herbicides, de métaux lourds et d’isotopes radioactifs déversé depuis la Seconde Guerre Mondiale provoque des troubles physiologiques mortels chez un nombre croissant d’espèces. Les deux aspects de ce changement pourraient aboutir à la destruction d’une large partie des organismes vivants. Mais le discours officiel assure que tout peut continuer comme avant, avec un peu d’isolation thermique, un vague tri des déchets domestiques et quelques éoliennes, et surtout sans cet horrible charbon. Il n’est jamais question d’une catastrophe imminente qui ne concernera pas seulement quelques iles du Pacifique. Est-ce de l’ignorance, de l’aveuglement, la volonté de ne pas effrayer le vulgum pecus, ou la certitude que les mieux munis s’en sortent toujours?

Vers la fin des années ’60 un projet d’aéroport fut étudié pour accueillir le tout nouveau Concorde. Mais un aéroport juste pour un avion supersonique… et que feraient ses passagers au milieu d’une lande au nord de Nantes? Le projet n’eut pas de suite, sauf le maintien des appropriations de terres par le domaine public. Une trentaine d’années plus tard, l’aéroport de Nantes-Atlantique avait beaucoup augmenté son trafic, et ses environs s’étaient urbanisés. Un nombre croissant d’administrés se plaignaient d’être constamment survolés. Des promoteurs immobiliers ont raisonné qu’un bout de piste pour avions rapportait moins qu’un immeuble. Et un député-maire ambitieux a ressorti des cartons l’ancien projet d’un nouvel aéroport à Notre-Dame-des-Landes. L’argument était que le nombre de voyageurs avait doublé, qu’il doublerait encore et que l’infrastructure existante ne suffirait plus. Sauf que passer d’un million de personnes qui partent de Nantes et qui y reviennent, ou qui arrivent à Nantes et en repartent, à deux millions, n’est pas la même chose que le passage de deux à quatre. D’où viendront ces deux millions de touristes et de vacanciers supplémentaires qui enfin se décideront de monter et descendre d’avion à Nantes? Pour les promoteurs du nouvel aéroport, cela semble aller de soi. Ce qui a doublé hier doublera demain. Mais nous avons vu que la croissance mondiale ne peut pas maintenir son rythme passé, et que la planète vacille déjà sous l’effet des déjections actuelles. On ne peut qu’en conclure que ceux qui nous gouvernent sont stupides, ou coupés de la réalité par des entourages de béni-oui-oui, ou, plus probablement, tellement imprégnés de libéralisme capitaliste, idéologiquement et matériellement, qu’ils ne peuvent envisager, ni même concevoir que tout cela est en bout de course. La transition n’aura pas lieu, et l’effondrement de la finance et celui de l’écosystème ne laissent planer que l’incertitude de leurs calendriers.

It's a man's world

The inequality between men and women goes back a long way. For ages, and still today in some regions of the planet, wives were taken by force or were bought from their parent-owners, which was close to the methods of acquiring slaves. This meant that the status of a woman and that of a slave were not dissimilar. But, when slave labour was progressively abandoned in favour of more productive wage labour, the emancipation of women did not follow. This was possibly due to the fact that only a privileged few owned slaves, whereas every adult male could expect to own a wife. However, myths, legends and a few cases that still survived a century or so ago, show that another relationship between men and women existed in prehistoric times.

The Neolithic had three main characteristics, hard stones were being shaped and polished into shock resistant tools, as opposed to brittle flint, some animals were being domesticated and bred selectively, and certain plants were being grown and selectively made more productive. Prior to this, humans had been hunter-gatherers, with men doing most of the hunting and women most of the gathering. When humans began leading herds to pasture and planting crops, one form or the other of the production of food and clothing came to predominate. The animal side seems to have given rise to a patrilineal ownership of herds, while the vegetable one brought about a matrilineal ownership of land. This is pure speculation, as no one will ever know what actually happened, but it does seem probable, and matrilineal societies must have existed in a developed form to become the matter of legendary tales. The historian Emile Mireaux gives the story of Oedipus as an example of how difficult it was for a son to inherit his father’s throne, when royalty was transmitted from mother to daughter. Whatever may have been, matrilineal societies succumbed, either to the strength of their own male members, or more probably to conquest by patrilineal nomads or conquering hordes. Thereafter, women were treated as chattel, to be bought and sold, taken by force, or exchanged as a sign of alliance.

History has recorded the existence of many powerful women, but they were invariably the mothers, wives, daughters or mistresses of powerful men. This could not be avoided in a world where might was right, because the strongest men have more physical force than the strongest women. Whenever the rule of law superseded the rule of force, the plight of women was alleviated. But it was only when slavery was progressively repealed in the 19^th century that the condition of women in general was questioned and began to evolve. John Stuart Mill was one of the first influential thinkers to argue that women could equal men in all domains other than size and muscle, if they were given the chance. That was in the 1860s, when steam power was replacing the muscle power of man and beast, when men, women and even children were being worked to death on an equal footing, when Britannia ruled the waves and Queen Victoria wore the crown of empire. Mill’s campaign to extend suffrage to women failed, however, and it took another fifty years and a World War, where millions of men were sent away to fight and die on the Continent, before British women did finally get the vote. Though that symbolic step did not change much, as men still ruled the roost at home and in public office, it opened the way.

The Second World War also mobilised large numbers of adult men, leaving women in charge of households, and giving them access to jobs they had previously been excluded from. Unfortunately this did not allow women to develop their own capacities and capabilities. It just allowed them to compete in a game where the rules had been set up by men. The challenge was: equal us if you can! In the 1960s and 70s, some militant feminists tried to escape this fatality by excluding men and keeping to themselves. But these movements often became sectarian and have remained marginal. So it’s still a man’s world, and women are still forced to make do with it, however high they rise in status, wealth and power.

Emile Mireaux, Les Poèmes Homériques, vol. II
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women