The democratic election that has just installed an individual with alarming mental shortcomings in the presidency of the United States is but one example among others of the slow-motion collapse of the socioeconomic system that prevails everywhere. The sinister scythe of the multinational corporations delivers up the planet to plunder, accelerates immiseration, threatens the very survival of populations, and devastates animal, vegetable and mineral resources, which fall prey to greed and the religion of money.
Why should we be surprised if everyday life and its human consciousness are smothered and stultified by the totalitarian rule of the economy? Or if the dismay and despair so relentlessly nurtured by the international of profit and by the words that serve it end up by creating submissive hordes to whom idiocy and heedless apathy offer a sort of consolation?
The great dictatorships of the past were not blind to this phenomenon and excelled at profiting from it. In the day of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao or a Franco, however, the development of capitalism and the social benefits it promised lent a degree of plausibility to the notion of a supreme guide with the authority to sacrifice the present on the bloody altar of happiness to come. Now that capitalism has lost its dynamism and invests the income it hurriedly reaps from its ravages in purely financial speculation, the stagnation into which it has sunk no longer has the slightest chance of providing an apprentice dictator with the strategic opportunities once furnished by state or private capitalism, a portion of whose profits ended up improving working conditions and boosting social gains.
Populism is the product of the bastardization of Nazism and Stalinism. The class consciousness of the proletariat had already been roundly crippled by trade-union and political bureaucracy by the time the great consumerist colonization brought the solvent power of the market of false well-being to bear on the remains of all the intelligence and combativity that the workers’ movement had developed and honed in its struggles before capitalism abandoned the realm of production for the now far more profitable realm of consumption.
The proletariat has now regressed to a stage earlier than the one it reached by virtue of class consciousness. It has once more become that plebs which from antiquity to the French Revolution constituted a conglomeration of the exploited, the roiling and dangerous mass of the poor, trapped between servility and doomed revolt. Serviceable and manipulable at will, this new plebs is the hotbed where the populist tribunes foster their ambitions and satisfy their appetite for domination. Historical conditions no longer allow them to exercise power over the world, so they have no recourse but to cultivate their personal power. Chaos and stagnation are their armor and their arms. They are maggots on the corpse of the old world, which is dead but continues to rot. Nothing more. But this nothing is good enough for them, for they know that ahead of them there is nothing. And so will things remain so long as we make no effort to build the new world to which millions of human beings nevertheless aspire. This we know for sure.
I have been rebuked for harboring illusions about the insurrections that recently shook the Arab world in the name of freedom. True, those uprisings have subsided, but you do not need a great mind to realize that they will surely recur.
By striking a mortal blow against absolute monarchy, against the God that served as its guarantor and against the agrarian economy that undergirded it, the French Revolution and its Enlightenment restored to men and women the right to become human beings. The end of the mandate of heaven gave them back an earth and a life that had been stolen from them and that it behooved them to enhance.
It took hardly any time, however, for free trade, which by virtue of the free circulation of persons and goods had revived hopes of emancipation, to turn into a new tyranny, a new prison.
Once heard, though, the song of freedom is never forgotten. No eclipse can extinguish the sun of consciousness.
Having experienced every form of government, what remains of life and sensitive intelligence in women and men must inevitably find its way through the ruins. In opposition to the predatory behavior that rules that social jungle where, from the ancient world to this day, we have been locked in continual strife, we have no healthy choice but to initiate, on the basis of the autonomy of all, a project aiming in solidarity to renew the forces of life and form a new alliance with nature, a project that will eradicate from the planet the international of profit and the totalitarianism of the economy which are at present laying it waste.