Diversity and commonwealth

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 19^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch05.htm

Also: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch08.htm

2. For those who missed it, see this “constructed” photo of the moon:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/moon-phases-184414330.html

3. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm