New ideals are in urgent need

For the past three to four decades ideology has been increasingly dominated by wealth and power. Money and military might seem to decide just about everything nowadays, and this situation has been propagandised so effectively that it is generally perceived as an inescapable fatality. But this has not always been the case. Going back another couple of decades, widespread ideas were very different. In the 1960s and 70s rebellion was in the air. Songs protested, youth dropped out and huge crowds gathered in opposition to a system of segregation and imperialist war. A lot of people were badly beaten, some were jailed and some were murdered, and the system survived, but it had its back to the wall and was compelled to grant concessions. Johnson and Nixon were elected, Nixon twice, but the first was obliged to outlaw segregation and install social programs, while the second was forced to end America’s military engagement in Vietnam. In those days people still believed they could influence events outside of elections, and they did.

The 1960s saw the rise of a counterculture, much of which would later become mainstream. A generation had lost trust in its elders, who seemed stranded in a wartime past of black and white, at a time when colour was spreading in print, movies and TV. A monochrome world suddenly lit up in a rainbow blaze. And, with the possible assistance of psychedelic substances, perceptions were irremediably modified. This new, different way of seeing things was extremely radical and indiscriminate. The Old World had to change or disappear. The destruction concerned the whole political spectrum. The Right was neo-colonialist and racist. The Left was Stalinist and xenophobic. Both were misogynous homophobes sold out to corporate power. And both sides were shattered by this cultural upheaval. However, the fundamentals of class struggle remained. The Left never recovered from the exposure of Soviet and Chinese forced-labour internment “archipelagos”. Those two experiments in proletarian government had turned into totalitarian bureaucracies. So the belief in another path evaporated, leaving a bleak emptiness. On the other hand, the Right was quick to rally behind a few ideologues, such as Hayek and Friedman, and the more obscure members of the Heritage Foundation. By the late 1970s their neo-liberal discourse was dominant on both sides of the Atlantic. There was no alternative to market forces.

The 1960s and 70s were like a huge wrecking-ball. Turn on, tune in, drop out, and then, no future. The Cold War and the permanent threat of total nuclear annihilation were partly to blame, but Western society was in need of a severe rejuvenation. This did occur, but the driving hands were the video media and their centralised control. The spread of ideas must have a medium. Offset printing can manage on a small budget, satellite TV cannot. The propaganda war was won by weapons of mass delusion. The Right’s offensive to reclaim ideological dominance had the support of all major media outlets, and opposition was muted. The egalitarian middle-class spirit of the 1960s was swept into the dustbins of history, leaving a vague sense of nostalgia, and cutthroat competition returned with a vengeance. The 1% would come out winners, and the 99% would be losers.

Technology and ideology rule the world. But ideology is an abstraction that can be modified at will. As Orwell famously put it, “He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past”. Thought control and limiting its capacity are ancient practices. Education has always been closely supervised, and contradicting elements have been excluded. Few escape the conditioning powers of schooling, with its repetitive timetables, its forced obedience and its consensual content. Those who, by some extraneous hazard, do evade the standard format are branded as deviant and dangerous or, at best, as eccentric and weird. And universities, which should be centres of open and lively debate on all and every subject, and were that half a century ago, have become commercial enterprises selling entry tickets to better paid employment. And they are followed by the workplace at a bullshit job, with a growing mountain of debt to pay off. From early childhood people are trained to run a race towards a glimmering future, but they get trapped in a treadmill going nowhere, one of those countless wheels that keep the system going.

Fifty years ago, people climbed out of their ruts and tried to think and act differently. Youth was in the forefront, electrified by rock-n-roll and dazzled by colour. But a mistrust of over-30s and a general contempt for the old world meant there was very little proselytising. In fact, there was not much to proselytise. The object was more to ridicule the system than to propose something different to replace it. Going back to the country and adopting the rural life appealed to some, but it was often in a sectarian context. And, anyway, flower power was doomed to fade away. The structures of wealth and power were shaken but not brought down. The middle-class rebellion did not link up with the working-class, and was left stranded high and dry. It would pass the next couple of decades trying to rescue the privileges it had thrown overboard. Ignoring the contradictions opposing labour and capital, the middle-class imagined its condition was universal. When the class struggle resumed, it was crushed between the two adversaries.

Today capital is triumphant. It has conquered the planet, even the most recalcitrant regions, and its possession has rarely been concentrated in so few hands. But, having encompassed the globe, it has nowhere left to expand. This means that one capital can only grow at the expense of another. The world market is becoming a national confrontation. The colonial empires had faced a similar dilemma at the beginning of the last century, when there was no more space to occupy. That led to fighting, all-out war and, ultimately, the end of colonialism. But colonial expansion is about territory, whereas capital expands by immaterial financial invasions. America may have some eight hundred military bases scattered around the world, its real power comes from the US dollar. This dollar denomination dominates trade, derivatives and monetary reserves. The last time empires went to war, the conflict was territorial. This time it will be financial.

The reign of capital and the rule of profit have brought humanity and its planet to the brink, and are about to push them into extinction. The ideology of infinite accumulation of wealth and power contradicts the reality of a finite system. There are no other living worlds, outside of fiction. There is just one planet, Mother Earth, whose particularities are so improbable that it could be unique in the galaxy, if not the universe. Though it goes back a long way and has brought down many an empire, the ideology of always more cannot succeed. More profits, more debt, more waste, more corruption, more pointless production for the sake of producing, more is killing the planet, that tiny blue paradise spinning round the Sun in boundless emptiness. But more can only be countered by less, which is not nearly as glamorous. Less cannot compete with more when so many have next to nothing and so few have everything. However, less can become very attractive as an alternative to the void of total collapse.

Renewable and sustainable are part of the new idea, though their meanings lack precision. Solar panels and wind turbines do not regenerate themselves. They need a lot of inputs that are not renewables. As for consuming less or none of certain things, it is still marginal and only concerns those who are over-consuming, those who need two, three or more planets to keep up their lifestyles. The new ideology cannot oppose environmental destruction and species extinction without opposing their causes. It will have to reconsider the production of wealth and its distribution. It will have to examine how the many who have little can be urged on to exhaustion by the few who have much. It will have to dig deep into the human psyche and find why differences lead to competition rather than collaboration. It will have to revisit the past to construct a different future.