The erosive effect of the profit principle renders the land barren. The injunction “Nothing is true, so everything is permitted” promotes a nihilism that is good for business, because chaos favors every kind of malversation. Speculative capitalism sells off the ruins of the past, decimating the present in the process; it oversees the promotional sale of relics and it markets dead ideas which, no matter how obviously defunct, it swiftly galvanizes and passes off as the latest thing.
The State and the multinationals exploit the fetor of fear and emotional plague to deck out in new clothes such putrefied and nauseating ideologies as patriotism, communitarianism, tribalism, neoliberalism, neocommunism, and neofascism. The business mafias offer citizens a choice between leprosy and cholera, or in other words between protection dearly paid for and a lack of protection whose perils hired killers are assigned to emphasize.
The proletariat was conscious of the struggle to be waged against the exploitation of man by man. Plebeians by contrast possess only the animal’s survival instinct: their emotional blindness is governed by nothing save the power of the predator and the cunning of the prey. They withdraw into themselves in a mean-spirited fear and a resentful passion for security that interprets the presence of the Other, the foreigner, the “outsider,” the different—Jew, Arab, Gypsy, homosexual, or simply the next-door neighbor—as a threat of universal annihilation.
A diffuse and fantasied terror now presides over bloody upsurges of nationalism, religious fanaticism, and puritanism, complete with its explosions of hedonism.
How to resist? How to come to grips with conservatism and bar the way to the most insufferable form of populism? None of the solutions proposed is satisfactory. We do not want a reverse violence that meets terror with terror, fear with fear and aggression with aggression. Yet we also reject humanistic hypocrisy, the bleating, mushy and bleeding-heart ideology that reduces human rights to the sort of promotional packaging that commercial interests are so good at turning to their advantage.
Once the corruption intrinsic to the cult of money had broken down the barriers between Right and Left political parties, that same corrupt system hastened to re-erect them as a way of concealing its scandalous proliferation by means of a sort of commercial bal masqué conducted in both camps at once. It was indeed imperative that popular anger be prevented from turning against the real agents of economic, political, social and existential disaster, namely finance capital and the multinational corporations. Attention had to be drawn away at all costs from the sight of the sneaking tentacles put out everywhere by the market and by financial speculation. It falls to the communications media, tried and tested by the advertising industry, to divert this anger, to redirect it onto scapegoats and to fuel absurd contests between good and evil—two perfectly interchangeable principles that serve the purposes of both factions.
Populism swindles popular anger: it is the demagogic co-optation of outrage and revolt.