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