Social
divisions appeared very early in human history, possibly as soon as
urban clusters allowed a division of labour. The Aztecs, who were at
the dawn of metallurgy and writing when Cortez and his mercenaries
destroyed them, belonged to one of a series of categories, priests,
soldiers, merchants, artisans and those who tilled the soil and
raised domestic animals for food and textiles. These specialised
groups filled the different functions of society, but they also
formed a hierarchy with priests and soldiers at the summit. Ideology
and force have always been the tools of power. At the time – Cortez
landed in the Yucatan in 1519 – the schools that gave access to
those dominant functions were open to all citizens. Only the monarchy
was hereditary because of a mythical ancestry, and the merchants seem
to have kept to themselves. The pre-Columbian empires in Mexico and
Peru were probably quite similar to the early Bronze Age ones in
Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China.
Ideology
seems to have dominated early civilisations. They needed the
obedience and coordination of large numbers for all endeavours,
including warfare. But with body-armour and weapons made of bronze, a
small band could conquer a kingdom. The military pushed the clergy
into a subordinate position. The two groups jostled for supremacy
until brute force and the “soft” power of propaganda and thought
control finally realised their mutual interests, as they pushed for
the advent of total war. And as they waged it, their powers developed
and grew to totalitarian dimensions. Perpetual war became a
necessity, as it had been for Aztec society. And so the Empire has
been warring continuously, covertly or overtly, through proxies and
directly, with a huge cost to humanity just to keep control.
Early
empires were ruled by soldiers and priests, but they also had
merchants who helped spread the imperial domain and received military
backing when necessary. Over time merchants became bankers and the
masters of financial transactions. These newcomers were not welcomed
by the holders of power who countered them ideologically and
militarily. City merchants resisted, some of them successfully,
gaining a share of power notably in England and Holland. These
merchant-bankers had hardly had time to consolidate their position
that a new competitor joined the struggle in the form of an
industrial entrepreneur. By the end of the 19th century,
industry and banking had subordinated the pen and the sword.
Production and accountancy imposed their laws on government.
The
industrial revolution modified the structures of power. The
production of wealth moved from the land to the factories, from the
countryside to the towns. It also broke up the old classifications.
Society was divided into the few who owned property and the many that
did not. Shanty towns and slum dwellings sprang up like mushrooms,
and the vast majority learned to live hand-to-mouth, with an early
death as their only prospects. This class chasm could only be
maintained by violence, and state terror prompted individual acts of
terrorism, and this escalated the levels of outrage. State terror
waxed and waned unevenly around the globe, through total war and
partial peace. A few privileged regions saw social improvements.
Infant mortality fell and life expectancy grew, and there was a
modest accession to property for an expanding middle class.
Total
war gave governments a central role in organising production, and the
military became the major consumers of that production. Ideology and
force were back in command. But the propaganda was about sharing the
burden of violence, and conscript armies in all-out war tend to
result in some social levelling. And the aftermath of WW2 followed
that tradition. But government and the military had become major
actors in the production and consumption cycle, so that fighting
continued on a more modest scale and the Cold War prompted a race for
ever more deadly weapons. Government continued the funding of
consumption by its military stockpiles and by social programs. But it
was paying this extravaganza by taxing the rich. So a reaction set in
and gained momentum in the 1980s.
Hot
and then cold wars and post-colonial fighting in Asia, Africa and
Latin America had brought back the dominion of ideology and force,
and the circumstances imposed a communal objective and a sharing of
the burden. By the mid-1970s, America had withdrawn its soldiers from
Indochina, and Portugal had done the same in Angola and Mozambique,
so the level of violence abated to countering small insurgencies. The
colonial wars had spread division and broken the unanimity of WW2 and
the early Cold War years. The mass movements opposed to those wars
disbanded once they were over, leaving industrial societies with a
sense of disorientation, and opening the way for the individualism of
wealth accumulation. The Reagan/Thatcher years were the beginning of
the end of solidarity, social justice and labour unions. Then China
opened up to foreign investments and the Soviet Union fell apart.
Capitalism went global, producing where costs were low and selling
where prices were high, with commercial finance overshadowing it all.
The
class structure in the 20th century made room for a middle
class that served as a fender to class confrontations. And the social
elevator seemed to function, even for minorities. Meanwhile the
ruling classes continued their own struggle over the sharing of the
nation’s produce. The Great Depression of the 1930s was a failure
of finance and industry that provoked a resurgence of government and
military power. Administrations and armies became plethoric, into the
war and beyond. The turning point was the disastrous ending to
America’s massive military adventure in Indochina. The panicked
evacuation of Saigon in 1975 was the counterpoint of the 1929 Wall
Street crash. Government and military power had failed, so finance,
trade and industry could take back control. However, the
administration and the military allow for social mobility, and
promotions are largely meritocratic, whereas wealth is inherited as
well as gained. Governments and armies have the public interest in
mind, health, education, law, order and defence. The accumulation of
wealth is always privately motivated.
An
ideological turnaround occurred in the 1980s. Big government had
shown its incompetence, and “civil” society was just waiting to
prove it could manage much better. The market would decide what was
or was not to be. Wealth took hold of government and pumped it dry.
An increasing portion of taxes were cancelled or given back as
subsidies, and governments relied increasingly on borrowing to fulfil
their social obligations. And those obligations began to shrink, by
less funding or by turning them over to the private sector. The
non-profitable part was subjected to austerity, and anything
potentially profitable was sold off. This also affected China, the
ex-USSR and other “socialist” regimes, where state control of the
economy had been almost absolute. Private enterprise and getting rich
quick were the new global standards. And soon labour was competing
internationally for jobs and wages.
The
sharing out of a nation’s wealth is an ideological struggle. The
political power of government sides with capital or with labour, with
the few or the many, and mostly navigates somewhere between the two.
Governments are preoccupied by their nation’s wellbeing or by that
of its wealthiest minority. Is human society an ecosystem where all
factors are equally important for a functioning whole, even a few
parasites, or is it divided into masters and slaves? The second case
has been recurrent throughout history, as it can easily be made a
reality with the brute force of superior weaponry. More egalitarian
societies have also existed and have been humanity’s brightest
moments. When all potentialities have a chance to be realised, the
world is much more joyous and progressive than when some must be
constantly subdued by the might of others. They are also far more
complex and difficult to realise, while nothing is simpler than the
rule of armed force. So simple that it is only able to reproduce
itself, expand its domain and over reach its capacities. It cannot
evolve into something else. It can only be endured, and occasionally
brought down in its moments of weakness. As La Boétie noted a few
centuries ago, slavery is possible because people accept servitude.
And every slave owner is enslaved to a higher master. Only an
egalitarian society can avoid this bondage, as even the very rich are
the servants of capital, its demands and its incoherencies.
Class
divides began as divisions of labour. But they only became a
birthright with the hereditary transmission of private property.
Ultimately they opposed those who owned property and those who did
not. In an agrarian society, land owners oppose the peasantry. In an
industrial society, capital opposes labour, the ownership of the
means of production on one side and workers on the other. But the
divisions of production also divide these two groups. And those
divisions have multiplied as countless new products have been
invented. Profits and wages remain separate and conflicting, but even
that border is blurred by crossovers, where wage workers have income
from savings, and rentiers may be earning a salary. It is when the
income gap widens that this common ground shrinks to insignificance.
And that is when the middle class loses its status, its desirable
model and its political power. Without that mediation society
polarises, and desperation promotes violence.
Engels
seems to have come up with the notion of a “bourgeois-proletariat”,
also a “labour aristocracy”. He and Marx developed the idea, and
Marx was quite virulent, accusing them of treachery to their class
origins. Lenin used the concept in his analysis of imperialism, and
mentions it in his critique of leftism.
“That country’s (England) exclusive position led to the
emergence, from the “masses”, of a semi–petty-bourgeois,
opportunist “labour aristocracy”. The leaders of this labour
aristocracy were constantly going over to the bourgeoisie, and were
directly or indirectly on its pay roll.” (1) This
elite would form the post-WW2 middle class, the white collar workers
that spread through corporations and administrations. They managed
education, engineering, research, health and banking. They received
generous salaries and occasionally started their own successful
business. But on the whole they did not own the capital they laboured
for. They were better off and “educated” than their fellow blue
collar workers, but they remained the servants of capital, albeit
voluntarily. Engels and Marx associated this privileged group to the
plunder of empire, a trickle down. And an affluent middle class could
allow for Henry Ford’s principle of labour being able to afford the
consumption of its mass production. But, after WW2, empire became
more of a cost than a profit for imperial nations as a whole. And
credit started to replace salaries as the wherewithal for
consumption. Colonial plunder evolved into trading consumption for
investments, consumer goods for raw materials. Exporting consumption
relieved the burden of consuming mass production, as a portion of
consumer goods could be exchanged abroad for investments without the
need for solvent consumers at home. This led to ex-colonies
accumulating trade deficits and getting ever deeper in debt. However,
the credit granted to foreign markets was not enough. So governments
and households also needed to increase their borrowing. And that
necessity accelerated when the trading process went into reverse.
Outsourcing production meant that investments were being exported and
consumption imported. It also entailed the closing of factories and
the dereliction of labour organisations. The bourgeois-proletariat or
middle-class saw their privileges eroded. Their wages stagnated and
their children’s prospects in a “gig” economy were grim.
Over
the past three decades, the class spectrum has seen its middle slowly
dissolve, leaving a widening gap between the ruling owning class and
the rest of the population. Some have estimated that the
concentration of wealth is presently comparable to what it was at the
beginning of the last century, a period of violent social upheavals
with a climax in totalitarian global war. The demise of the middle
class leaves a void. It interrupts social mediation. Capital
confronts labour without intermediaries. It must take off its liberal
mask and uncover its fundamental brutality. The brute force it
applied to foreign nations and minorities had advantaged the labour
aristocracy. But, as situations and incomes decline, the members of
the middle class are pushed to the side of labour and subjected to
the daily violence of near-poverty. Their dreams and aspirations are
crushed. But their education, their ideology, their basic instincts
prevent them from joining the proletarian ranks, and they end up as
functionaries in a nationalist revival. When the hyper-concentration
of wealth fails, as it logically must, the ruling class resorts to
whipping up resentment against all that does not comply to a given
standard of thought and appearance. It promotes racism and xenophobia
as a smoke screen to cover its own failings, and it is usually
carried away by the torrent it has provoked. Unfortunately, others
also suffer in the process.
Societies
are divided by unequal wealth, by different functions and
professions, by levels of education and by various ethno-cultural
ancestries. Some of these divisions cannot be avoided, because of the
division of labour and because people have always migrated. But gaps
in wealth and education have no reason to exist. They are the
products of concentrated property and power. Poverty and ignorance
are not fatalities. They are the consequences of extreme wealth and
its reliance on social control. For a few to have much, many must be
content with little. In a meritocracy, social disparities may be
traced to individual capacities and ambitions. But when wealth and
power are hereditary an ideological justification is necessary. This
impossible task follows tortuous paths that convince all
beneficiaries. As for the rest, if their reasoning powers are not
developed they are unable to contest the dominant discourse. Social
control relies on beliefs not reason. The reasons for things are
often intricate and sometimes non-existent. Reasoning can be picked
apart, and shown to be reliable or not. Beliefs can neither be proven
nor disproven. They are held in the intimacy of the mind and
irradiate all thought. A hereditary and co-opted ruling class must
shape those beliefs to their own advantage. Reason cannot justify its
situation, as reason weighs the pros and cons and inherited status is
left wanting. An equal chance according to physical capacities and
the power of intent are far more convincing qualifiers for
leadership. And there is no logic in the private accumulation of vast
wealth. “When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high
social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
We shall be able to rid ourselves of many pseudo-moral principles
which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have
exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the
position of highest virtues.” J.M. Keynes (3). This being so, the
ruling class relies on beliefs to exist. The main one, and possibly
the oldest, is the belief that a particular ancestry gives certain
rights. This notion was the mainstay of kings, usually with some kind
of divinity in the background. Montezuma was emperor of Mexico
because his ancestor had wed a Toltec princess, and that linked him
to the divine Quetzalcoatl. Meanwhile European kings were claiming
divine rights. Religious faith is a formidable tool for consolidating
minority rule. After all, if supernatural powers approve of the
status quo, and if they did not it would not be, who can contest it?
And then there is that opiate effect of pain reduction and
dependency. A beatific afterlife alleviates the hurt in this valley
of tears. And once the habit is acquired, breaking it is too painful
to consider. Other more material gods also have their faithful
followers. Wealth and power are often bowed down to, and celebrity
has its many cults. But the belief that seriously threatened the
creed of a hereafter was the promise of an earthly beatitude in a not
far distant future, for the children, or their children, or maybe
their children’s children. But that dream somehow lost its way and
ended up as totalitarian nightmares. And it may be fool’s gold
anyway. A classless society seems to contradict the complexity of an
urban industrial setting. Differences are necessary to fill the
multiple roles. And a hierarchy of talents imposes a scale of
remunerations, as should the indispensable functions that have been
recently highlighted. What does not seem necessary, is that some live
off the labour of others because they own the means of production.
Rent, interest and dividends are taxes on labour, the taxation that
property levies on society without supplying any services in return,
except employment if it is deemed profitable. A uniform society would
be unbearable and completely dysfunctional. Complexity needs variety,
and an ant-hill cannot be a model for humanity, except at a very
brutal and primary level where that humanity is denied. Putting
people behind bars and razor-wire or training them to kill are
examples that come to mind. And the military and prison archipelagos
have spread at an alarming rate, like a parasitic progression.
Since
its conception as a duo with the Moon, planet Earth has been life’s
laboratory. Though the primary building blocks (viruses?) may exist
everywhere, except one presumes in stars, for life to evolve into
more complex forms it needs the very particular circumstances offered
by the third planet from the Sun. That is, abundant water, an
oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere with plenty of carbon dioxide, a fairly
stable tilt of its axis thanks to the Moon, and drifting continents.
This exceptional combination gave life the opportunity to evolve into
the most amazing plants and animals. There were also cataclysmic
events, the Moon’s pockmarked surface unchanged by erosion bears
witness to a constant bombardment by asteroids and meteorites (2),
and the collisions of continents may have been more violent in their
early stages. But the basic conditions remained and life adapted to
successive new environments, even after major extinctions. Life’s
diversity was the key to its continuing success. And it is the
adaptability of humans that has allowed them to colonise all the
world’s continents. Life adapts by genetic mutations and that
selective process may take many hundreds or thousands of generations.
Humans learned to adapt by making things. They mediated their
environment with weapons, tools, clothing and shelters. At some point
they started modifying it, with fire, irrigation, selective planting
and breeding, and with urbanisation. The urban artifice concentrated
populations, brought the power of numbers and resulted in empire.
Empire destroyed the variety of cultures, but it multiplied the
variety of functions.
The
magnificent variety of life on Earth, human and non-human, has
progressively been reduced. Cultures and species have disappeared
with an accelerating frequency. At present, a few cultural forms
dominate the world’s thinking, and their professed differences are
fading away. And a few species take up most of the space and make up
most of the biomass, and their varieties are diminishing. Under human
stewardship, life’s exuberance is being reduced to conformity.
Sameness exists in herds, flocks and shoals, whereas early human
cultures gave importance to tribal and totemic distinctions, and to
the variety of their environments. Uniformity was introduced by
agriculture on the flood plains of great rivers, and by organised
warfare. Peasant soldiers should be as identical as possible.
The
might of the sword tried to impose uniformity and empires would
clash, but other forces were working in the same direction. Money,
the unit that measures exchange value, makes everything homogeneous,
just the quantities are different. And writing created a standard
that had to be accepted by everyone, especially with the mass
production of printing. And religious conformity has always been an
instrument of concentrated power. However, these uniformities
contradict the hereditary hierarchy of power and introduce the notion
of equality. But they stop the concept’s universality by
restraining it to the limits of a common language, currency and
faith. They bring about the nation-state, the same inside and
different outside, different and inferior. Uniformity was brought
about by education, dress codes, conscription, mass production and
mass media. But if everyone must be the same, those who do not
conform must become invisible. Minorities must hide in ghettos, and
risk violence when they adventure out. “Nation” and “race”
are never far apart, and both feed on a sense of superiority.
The
20th century was shaped by the idea of national unity,
them and us. Borders became the lines that defined identity. It
started a long time ago with the Channel between France and England
and the power struggle for territorial control of two royal
dynasties, the Capetian and the Plantagenet. That narrow stretch of
water materialised a cultural divide that became the source of
perpetual conflict. English kings spent the following centuries
subduing the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, while French kings
increased their dominion to the Pyrenees, the Alps and an undefined
region separating France from what would become Germany. Meanwhile,
other states were emerging. Spain and Portugal had pushed the Moors
back over the Straits of Gibraltar, and Holland would break away from
Spanish suzerainty. These five proto-nations then set out to conquer
the world, with steel, gunpowder and ocean-going warships. Later
other nations were constructed, Tsarist Russia, the German Reich,
Greek and Italian Monarchies, while Poland waxed and waned. After
1918 a series of treaties dismantled the Austrian and Ottoman empires
into numerous entities, most of which were a mix of cultural
identities suddenly brought together by borders, some of which were
quite arbitrary. They would struggle to find unity, as had Latin
American nations when Spain’s empire broke up. The path of violent
constraint followed by the earliest nations, the cultural compulsion,
ethnic cleansing and ethnocide, could not be avoided. This surprised
the established nations, as though homogeneity occurred
spontaneously. After 1945 a swath of new nations emerged from the
ruins of empire, locked in and separated by geographical lines drawn
by the colonial powers that had no connections with the different
populations living there. As in Europe and the Middle East, bloody
struggles ensued as one group imposed its dominion on the others.
Nation
building is a messy affaire, where a part must encompass the whole.
Abandoning one’s cultural heritage for another is never easy. It
can be the choice of emigration, but when it is imposed, refusal can
lead to violence and repression. Monarchic empires can rule over
diversity. The nation-state must have conformity, a need that is
constantly confronted by class and wealth inequality. As Anatole
France pointed out, “in its munificent equality the law forbids
rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging and stealing
bread”. The law is the same for all, in principle at least, but it
favours those who write it. And so it allows tax evasion for some
incomes but not for wages. The nation’s unity is split by wealth
inequality, an unbalanced situation that can reach a certain extreme
before toppling down. The dogma of national cohesion cannot
incorporate differences. It is fundamentally racist and xenophobic,
but it is also egalitarian for those who fit the standard model.
Societies
are complex organisations of specialised functions that need to work
together in harmony, though recent events have shown that some of
those functions are more essential than others. Social harmony is
disrupted when the common wealth is shared too unevenly. And wealth
inequality is the direct result of capital accumulation and the
concentrated property of the means of production, which also cause
unsustainable debt growth and environmental deterioration. As wealth
and power concentrate in ever fewer hands, the ruling class is
threatened with revolt and possible revolution. Apart from hiring
more mercenaries, the ruling class will do all it can to divert
public anger away from its plutocratic incompetence. It will call for
national unity, and will identify internal and external enemies that
are a menace for the nation as a whole. This recipe of brute force
and xenophobic propaganda has been successful in the past, though it
has also deviated into mass murder and all-out war. Lincoln concluded
his famous comment by, “you cannot fool all the people all the
time”. But some people can be permanently fooled by having them
believe they belong to the privileged group, and that they have more
in common with the ruling class than they do with minorities and
foreigners, the dark skinned and the destitute.
Humanity
is divided into nations, and each must affirm its difference from all
the others, especially its closest neighbours. And those defining
particularities must be shared by all a nation’s members. But
national borders have never contained a uniform population, least of
all those that are the heritage of empire, so that nations are
themselves spilt into dominant and dominated groups. In the older
nations of Europe these cultural differences had begun to subside
when immigration brought in new ethnic minorities and set up new
divisions. In most of the Americas the heritage of the slave trade
from Africa is indelible, and the descendants of those who were
transported in chains are still marginalised just about everywhere.
In North America this impossible merger has been duplicated by
immigration from the south. And immigrant communities from around the
world add to the confusion. In Africa and Asia, new nations inherited
the borders drawn by the colonial powers that took no account of the
different populations they closed in or broke apart. Both continents
have been subjected to constant upheavals. Nations are supposed to be
homogeneous and distinctive. In fact they are conflicting patchworks
and all must obey the dictates of global capital.
The
world is split into nations, and they in turn have cultural and
social partitions. All these divisions are distractions. They provoke
confusion and, according to the ancient adage, that benefits the
ruling class who actively promote it to a varying degree. Societies
cannot be uniform. They need a wide variety of skills, aptitudes and
functions. These countless tasks involve more or less prestige and
are more or less burdensome. But today’s societies have evolved out
of slavery and serfdom where a bonded population was forced to
accomplish the work that had the least prestige and was the most
burdensome. And when labour was “freed”, the chains of hunger and
cold were not broken. The most demeaning tasks were the least paid.
However there is a new perception of how important those jobs are.
The people emptying dustbins have proved to be more essential than
all the private-jet flying executives, who were mostly grounded
anyway. Something similar occurred during WW2, though who knows where
the present situation is leading to. Back then it became obvious that
it was ordinary men and women who were making the weapons and doing
the fighting, and who ultimately had won the war. This had a social
levelling effect, but the military aspect brought a corset of
uniformity. Today’s essential actors are all civilians, while the
gunmen in uniform are shown up for what they are, the mercenary
guardians of wealth and power. If a levelling does occur, it may
avoid the uniformity and give diversity a chance. This global war
against a non-human enemy might save the world from the usual
inter-human wars that have been waged so far, when wealth and power
have been so concentrated at the summit that the social pyramid
cannot bear the weight and collapses. And, as in any war, it is
youths who will decide the outcome. So far they have moved in a
direction opposed to the old devils of the past. They have grown up
without CNN, NYT and Rupert Murdoch. They have shaped their opinions
on the web where a host of ideas are on offer, and where the image of
reality often diverges completely from the one constructed by the
ruling ideology. The medium is the message, and internet has no
central office, no editorial line, and the control of content by
governments or providers seems an impossible task. Previous
generations had been on the receiving end of the press, Hertzian
radio and TV, and Hollywood. And all these extremely centralised
productions are parts of capitalism’s means of control. They
persist as do habits, but the web is a negation of that model as it
is a two-way connection between anyone and everyone, at least all
those who can access a device and afford a connection. This is
unprecedented and can only compare to the effect of the artisan
printing-press on the circulation of unorthodox thoughts, with a
vastly multiplied dimension. The future could be made of diversity,
with equal opportunities for wealth and education. It might favour
the convictions of reason over those of faith and devotion. It will
need that and more to manage the growing disruptions of climate
change.
2.
For those who missed it, see this “constructed” photo of the
moon:
