Sado-populism
Every time a fascist-flirting regime is defeated in an election, more column inches and podcast minutes are devoted to the sense that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. When Trump, Bolsonaro, Sunak’s Tories or the Law and Justice Party in Poland lose elections, the centrist commentariat breathes a sigh of relief, believing its priors to be confirmed. Their vision, however, is too short term: these are likely not to be fascistic deviations from a liberal democratic trajectory. Instead the electoral defeats promise to be temporary relief from the existential threat to “civilisation.”
The neoliberal project underway from the 1940s but truly gaining traction in the 1970s and 80s in the Thatcher/Reagan era was marketed as selling freedom to succeed. In fact, the program was effectively neofeudal. The ultra-rich were in the process of using their charitable foundations to fund projects to remake the law to serve their desires, not the common wealth.
The oligarchs would have freedom from tax and “red tape.” This meant the public would have “freedom” from services such as decent healthcare and education, maintained bridges, roads and, ultimately, staffed services like air traffic controllers and the weather bureau. The public would also have “freedom” from decent working conditions, safe consumables, clean air and water.
The protests that would inevitably result would need to be crushed to prevent interruptions to profits.
The pain created for the vast majority of the public has been immense. Wages have stalled since the neoliberal project gained traction. (CEO remuneration, by contrast, has skyrocketed. Another of the neoliberal activists’ scams was the notion that meteoric executive pay equalled profits.) The middle class has shrivelled, and the precariat grown.
This pain provides a deep well of energy to be mined. Historian Timothy Snyder refers to the process as a function of sado-populism. The more pain generated in the population, the more energy available to breed hate of selected targets. Naturally the oligarchs’ spin doctors make sure the targets are not themselves as the true cause of the pain, but instead vulnerable minority groups.
A system built on maintaining a pool of unemployed so that the poorest workers are frightened to make waves cleverly depicts the unemployed and working poor as moral failures without the diligence to succeed in a society that has actively trapped the vast majority of them in place.
The private education system has boomed: those that can afford it can boost their own children into the enabler class. The public education system has been cut to bare bones: the Civil Rights era proved the threat to the oligarchs of an educated populace without enough debt to chain it to the grind.
In America, the Right is trying to destroy the public education system entirely. Public school education has been hard to control: students have learnt inconvenient facts about societies built on injustice and about climate science. In the post-public school era, anyone who can’t afford to be educated at private or compliant church school can be trapped in poverty-wage labour, replacing deported migrants.
The oligarchs’ spin doctors are replicating this campaign in Australia with the “charter school” movement as their initial fight.
Oligarchs and their spin doctors disguise the dehumanising campaigns against the poor and against vulnerable minorities as “virtue” and “patriotism” instead of the unmerited bigotry it truly is.
The creation of a separate “reality,” where migrants are rampantly committing crimes, Antifa is burning down our cities and abortion doctors are murdering full-term babies, is a mutually isolated space from fact-based civil society. Neither of us sees what the other knows. This allows Trump to win the popular vote in 2024 against expectation.
In this world, climate change is a rort inflicted on us by a “them” that might be Jews or leftists. Any pain inflicted by climate catastrophes – whether a single disaster or inflationary pressures on strained food production – fuels the energy that drives the movement. Conspiracies held by both the undereducated and the partisan explain that the “left” in government is manipulating the weather to hurt their political enemies, or maybe it is Jewish space lasers.
Like Covid, the mass disasters of our era challenge our certainties, making us frightened and angry.
The fact that the climate crisis has only begun to generate the massive numbers who will be displaced as their homelands become uninhabitable is providing an exponentially-growing reservoir of hate and fear to be siphoned.
Meanwhile, both fossil fuel and disaster capitalism more broadly have massive profits opened up to them by melting icecaps and local catastrophe. They have no intention to divert course. The neoliberal project is literally driving us towards “civilisational collapse.”
The oligarchs’ iron grip on career politicians, preventing them acting on the popular will, leads to burning outrage and merited disdain. Cynicism is the logical result. Politicians who are chained and prevented from acting on their election promises of change breed cynicism in the democratic project. Neoliberalism has destroyed faith in large sectors of the public that democracy can work for them because, in a neoliberal world, it can’t.
This cynicism serves the oligarchs: people who do not believe in the power of their vote to improve their lot are much less of an impediment to the powerful’s goals.
In the world inhabited by the radicalising Right, it is not the oligarchs that are hurting them, but selected minorities. In this world it is not poor health care, inadequate education or guns that are hurting children; it is the existence of LGBTQIA+ people.
In this world, women’s autonomy is a threat to the moral order. Firstly women are to be stripped of the right to control what happens to their bodies. They must engage in sexual activity only within sacred marriage with the intent to be impregnated. Then Project 2025 plans that women will be robbed of the right to gain divorce from toxic marriages. Some are strategising to strip women of the right to vote. The agenda is to drive most women out of the civic space, returning it to men.
Here the Christian Right, gathered so closely around Trump, gains support from the toxic cyberspace known as the manosphere. Their violent misogyny, homophobia and racism breed a toxic poison that is poured into the ears of disaffected young men around the world for hours on end in podcasts, YouTube and on social media. This is not a fringe movement: it is inherent to the tech-bro mindset that shapes social media platforms and now the American government.
The billionaire tech-bros’ social media platforms in all their variety have replaced mainstream media as the generator of reality. Mainstream media, meanwhile, has earned the deep cynicism that has resulted from its many failures and accompanied its flailing efforts to retain relevance and financial sustainability in the internet era. The strongest surviving media platforms are those owned and deployed by oligarchs intent on manufacturing the reality they need.
The oligarchs’ media, their spin operations such as the Atlas Network, and their online operations are not bound by truth or decency or good faith. They are splattergun operations that shoot muck at a wall to see what sticks. Humour, cruelty and disingenuousness are easy to deploy when all that matters is victory, power and profit.
The coalition of conspiracists, misogynists, and Religious Right theocrats is being coalesced into a voting bloc that does not care that it is voting for its own immiseration. The oligarchs funnel torrents of money into this project that gives them the political power to shape their world to their desires.
People who care about the well-being of the community and the world’s population more broadly look laughably earnest to the cackling mass of disaffected. Politicians who do offer policy find themselves discredited by oligarch spin as “socialists” or “woke.” Furthermore, in sado-populism policy no longer matters: oligarchs have created a world that has lost faith in the power of government to help them.
Since 2020, the combined wealth of the US’s 614 billionaires has almost doubled, extracting USD2.947 trillion dollars from the common wealth. Neoliberal strategising has served them well: in America, they have stripped every constraint from their ability to extract wealth without interference and have directed the pain against the powerless.
Every extra hurt experienced by the public fuels the Right’s political machine and supercharges oligarchs’ wealth acquisition.
Price-gouging, for example, drives up inflation. This generates profit but also pain to fuel the machine. Incompetent or complicit reserve banks punish the consumer with higher interest rates since they, of course, have no power to tackle the price-gougers. The interest rate rises compound the inflation and the pain.
Biden’s government was, despite its horrific partnership in genocide (1), one of the more reformist Democrat governments in America’s history.(2) It was blocked by Republicans on many programs, because it is incumbent upon the oligarchs’ machine to ensure that policy can never be shown to work. The potential parties of the masses cannot win popularity with success. The broken information space ensures that the public mostly never knows about the programs or understands who blocked them. The populace is taught instead to believe the oligarchs’ freedom is its own freedom and policies that would help the masses are repugnant.
We cannot tackle this crisis without understanding the ingenious process that traps our centrist, and even centre-left, governments. We must see its parameters clearly to begin to tackle it.
Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese’s government needs to make some truly dramatic decisions that can pierce the walls that separate realities. Without genuine efforts to address community anger about such blights as profiteering supermarkets or climate inaction, the trap made for them by the oligarchs will be sprung.(3)
Then, we too will return to the fascist-trending politics of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.
(1) The transnational authoritarian project mutually reinforces its fellows here. Both Putin’s and Netanyahu’s wars fed into the success of Trump, whom they knew would serve their goals better. Meanwhile, corporations, as well as Atlas Network partners, fund and support far-right parties, because they can be better partners than liberal democracies. (Until such time as authoritarians stop suppressing protest and investigative journalism, and begin to take foreign assets for themselves.)
(2) Biden’s government has a mixed record on addressing domestic injustice. The Democrats are as captive to the various forces in the economy as any Labo(u)r government, meaning that their actions are piecemeal and peripheral at best. It was more pro-union than most American governments, after the destruction of unions which was a major goal of the Atlas Network spin and strategy machine. This Democrat message was not a consistent project, however, with the destruction of the rail workers’ sick leave campaign emblematic. The Inflation Reduction Act was meant to foster employment at home as well as being the most significant investment in a transition away from a fossil fuel economy in the world. That is not saying much, of course. The appointment of Lina Kahn to break monopolies has proved a much-resented obstacle to the oligarchs’ machinations to control markets.
Republicans voted against many policies that would have helped their constituents, with the rejection of the expansion of Medicare as the most notable generator of sado-populist pain continuing since the Obama era. Republican congresspeople also claim popular policies that they voted against as their own success. The collapse of our information space means that lies become truth, and ignorance prevails.
Arguably, though, the neoliberal consensus has created a deteriorating life for workers where such nuances only tackle the fringes of the injustice: why should they care?
(3) The current bill that feigns addressing money in Australian politics epitomises the Labor Party’s capture. They are voting with the illiberal Liberal Party to prevent new independents from gaining seats from them. Instead of addressing the media, disinformation and integrity crises in a way that might bolster a centrist party in the longer term, they seek to ensure the duopoly maintains power. This, despite the evidence that the last LNP government (with media partners) was working to ensure that a Labor victory would be ever more difficult to achieve. Labor seems to like its chains.
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be greatly appreciated.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
27 comments
Login here Register here-
Judith W -
John C -
Steve Davis -
Arnd -
Canguro -
Steve Davis -
Clakka -
Arnd -
Steve Davis -
Arnd -
Harry Lime -
Arnd -
Steve Davis -
Arnd -
Harry Lime -
Canguro -
Steve Davis -
Andrew Smith -
Andrew Smith -
Steve Davis -
Arnd -
Steve Davis -
Harry Lime -
Canguro -
Steve Davis -
Arnd -
paul walter
Return to home pageClear, concise and frightening.
Yesterday I was asked what drives authors to write stories like Tim Winton’s Juice and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future or even the decades old Stark by Ben Elton…
It’s their vision of the possible long term outcomes of the imminent dangers you describe.
What you so clearly put in to words that read true seems to go over the heads of 95% of the world’s population. Democracy is a joke, capitalism and greed rule and take everything you can get seems to be the common mantra of this century, especially among the so-called ‘elites’ (bottom feeders). We humans are a long way from ever being classed as ‘civilised’ when our biggest desires are based on greed and the desire for more more more!
Once again Lucy has presented an excellent run-down of the problem of emerging right-wing activism.
But again she has highlighted the symptoms of the problem and neglected the cause.
The cause is the innate and irreconcilable conflict of liberal democracy’s interests that has facilitated this rot from within.
What is the conflict of interests? The need to remain socially acceptable while empowering a socially destructive financial/economic system.
There was an article in The Guardian 18/11/24 by Nesrine Malik discussing the dilemma faced by the Democrats in the US as their support base withers, support for the right rises, and the potential for the same to happen to UK Labour.
“It’s a problem that Labour in the UK may well soon face. All you need is one compelling rightwing figure and Labour’s rousing “things will get worse before they get better” approach will be shredded… People feel trapped and want a sense of release, a promise of a dramatically different future, or just A future. Even if that sense of freedom comes vicariously from an autocrat who has flexed and snapped the chains of the system. And they want to feel as if they are part of something bigger and stronger as they get lonelier and weaker and their worlds fracture and atomise by the day. It’s not that they are not ready for democracy – democracy is not ready for them…So long as centrists double down on this system and hope for the best, western democracies will be vulnerable. I remember, in the tumultuous aftermath of the Arab spring, the question over whether Arabs were “ready for democracy” – but democracy alone cannot guarantee freedom and equality if the economic system in which it exists prevents those very qualities from emerging.”
Consider that last sentence. “Democracy alone cannot guarantee freedom and equality if the economic system in which it exists prevents those very qualities from emerging.”
That’s the very point I’ve been making here for months.
We will make no progress towards a peaceful prosperous future while we cling to a financial/economic system that not just facilitates inequity, but actively enforces it, as I pointed out at Three Poems. I referred there to an OECD report that recommended that Norway, with all its wealth, should cut back on social services.
There is a clear reluctance among supporters of liberal democracy to face the reality that their beloved system actively and deliberately entrenches suffering.
The sado-populism concept goes some way to describing what’s happening, but does not cut through to the heart.
Because this process is not an accident of history.
This is not wholly the doing of die-hard liberals who now enjoy the neo-liberal label.
The system ensures that suffering continues no matter who is in power — liberals, labor, conservatives, neo-liberals, all of whom support the financial structures of the liberal democracy concept.
The poverty, homelessness, unemployment and lack of options that fuel the rise of the Right are not down to bad luck, not down to lack of effort by those suffering.
These factors are planned. They are a part of the business plan of the liberal democracy project. The OECD report confirms that.
Liberals have created the conditions that will destroy their brand of democracy because those conditions are part and parcel of what it is to be liberal.
A weakening of society by pandering to greed and selfishness.
Claiming tolerance while criminalising dissent.
Market discipline for the masses and socialism for the wealthy.
These are all features that are depicted as normal, as neutral.
The problems these features cause can be fixed by the stroke of a pen, yet those problems are depicted as intractable dilemmas.
The problem we all face now is that the destruction of the liberal brand of democracy will be slow, it will be painful, and the guardians of the liberal brand will make sure that we all feel their pain.
The suffering has just begun.
Steve, thanks for saving me the effort.
I did book-mark Nesrine Malik’s article in The Guardian when I first read it.
I’ve got dozens of the bloody things in my collection. Highlights include Pankaj Mishra’s The west’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy failed to notice it rotting away from five years ago, and Owen Jones’s Hartlepool fell victim to the Labour leader’s lack of vision from three years ago.
I could go to my bookmarks and trawl for more, from The Guardian, or The New York Times, or The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Monthly, The Quarterly, … – the salient point being that Lucy isn’t exactly discovering new ground.
Things have gotten worse, are bound to get worse still, and worse after that. What I don’t understand is how it comes to pass that virtually nobody seems able to recognise the basic causal problem here.
Although I do not agree with Steve’s assertion that:
Nah!
On oligarchs & billionaires, for comparative purposes regarding how the wealthy have grown insanely wealthier, the 2023 documentary The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout, which examined the production and aftermath of the 1956 RKO feature film, noted that Howard Hughes, the owner of RKO studios, was at that time America’s richest man with a net worth of well over a billion dollars. His wealth grew to an estimated 2.5 billion by the time of his death in 1976.
cf. Elon Musk, 304B, Jeff Bezos, 219B, Mark Zuckerberg, 192B, Bill Gates, 104B, and the others… Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Steve Ballmer – all on the high side of 100 billion.
Hughes himself was quoted as saying, “I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire. Goddammit, I’m a billionaire!”
The documentary is a deep dive into two areas; The Conqueror was Howard Hughes’s last film, never released and a commercial failure, it was filmed in the Nevada desert near a small town called St. George which is in the south-west corner of Utah, it starred John Wayne & Susan Hayward, the filming took place not far from the AEC test site for atomic bombs where around 100 bombs had been exploded above ground, the desert film set was contaminated with radioactive fallout, nearly half of the 200 people involved in the production of the film – actors and film crew – contracted a range of cancers that were ultimately fatal; residents of St. George too, many cancers & birth defects despite being told time & again that they were under no risk and had zero exposure to radioactive fallout… ergo, government officials lied and lied and lied to these people, a pattern of behaviour that seems to be de facto policy in American affairs.
Arnd, thanks for the follow-up.
The “stroke of a pen” I referred to was simply the re-allocation of resources.
Easy to do in the physical sense. A mere stroke of a pen. And economically feasible.
The difficulty only comes from political considerations, most of which are nonsense.
We could cut our military expenditure by 20% without affecting our security, and we’d all be living in happyland, so to speak.
But no, politically it’s more sensible to make a huge donation to the US MIC.
Mafia-style protection money.
Thanks Lucy, well elucidated,
‘Trapped’, and ‘captured’ is IMO absolutely correct. I would warrant that >95% of the Oz populous would consider your words OTT, and that you could well be ‘nuts’. Hope is useless now the oligarchs have a firm hold. Of course the oligarchs’ wiles are self-defeating. But just how much wreckage will be wrought, and more-still what will be left for the ‘sado-populists’, or more likely, the ants and cockroaches to rebuild from? Will they have money? And who will demand they pay tax? After the obliteration, should there be any ‘elite’ or oligarchs left, will they be able to claim against their self-stranded assets?
I haven’t ready anything of his since ‘Capital’ – it nearly exploded my head – today I read a review of Picketty’s latest seems he’s onto something and is not letting go. Given the ‘sado-populists’, it’s a wonder he still has a job.
It’s much more than a political dilemma, it now seems a virtually unstoppable existential crisis, with a full head of effluvia.
Hi Steve:
Except that the current manner, principles and processes of resource allocation are deeply entrenched in contemporary society – meaning that many people’s career, income (and with that their capacity to feed, clothe, house and otherwise look after their families), their pension entitlements (Bert Hetebry made mention of one of his friends alerting him to the corporate profit provenance of his super benefits), and in many cases, their personal sense of identity (ask any one: Who are you?, and their occupation or profession will be one of the first criteria they mention) are intrinsically dependent on the current economics to continue to operate as is, with at the most only very minor adjustments.
I think that it is most important, especially for would-be-if-could-be revolutionaries like you and I, not to lose sight of the seriously disruptive consequences of revolutions.
Indeed, we seem to have once again returned to Upton Sinclair’s dictum that “It is very difficult to explain something to a man if that man’s pay cheque depends on his not understanding it!”
I have come to think that to some very important degree, this dictum holds true even amongst activists and revolutionaries: the fight against injustice, oppression and environmental destruction, andvagainst capitalism and the bourgeois order, is what has come to define the very essence of those activists. Take away capitalism, and you take away their self-definition, and possibly their whole reason for being here. Or as it was put by one of the more insightful Christian pastors I encountered in my life:
Thus, if you really pick through what it is that motivates people to do whatever it is that they are doing, and then ask yourself what it is they might be doing with their lives if (hypothetically speaking) we actually were coming close to realising some sort of anarcho-communist communal order, you might find many people staring into some nihilistic void, and finding that discombobulating and perhaps even frightening.
In one of my exchanges on The Conversation, I asked philosophy academic Patric Stokes this question – and did not receive much of an answer.
What would Lucy Hamilton be doing, if she wasn’t writing rousing articles on The AIMN?
(Though we do know what Michael Taylor would do: dropping anchor permanently in Pitlochry, which according to his words “Is surely the capital city of Utopia”, and posting on The AIMN about getting sozzled on uisge beatha. I can think of worse endeavours than that!)
Total agreement here, Arnd.
Although I hold out the faintest of hope that where Nesrine Malik says a compelling right-wing figure can do great harm, a compelling left-wing figure could do great things, achieve much.
I base that on the belief that (generally) we are left-wing by nature and right-wing by conditioning.
A figure from the left would have a far greater task of course, but it doesn’t hurt to dream.
Thanks for that link, Clakka.
From the article:
Here’s a link to an academic review of inheritance (pdf, about 15 pages).
I’m with Orestes Bronwson (page 10, top half, from memory). Mandatory, I believe, especially for all of those who preach the gospel of meritocracy and deliver sermons about The end of the age of entitlement
Steve,Arnd, Canguro et al, as much as I admire your obviously intelligent and well read admonitions,what is this going to change?We know what is going on regarding money and influence in our governing structures(captives to the neoliberal poison),but most people don’t have any idea,and are easily led.Little sites like this give those of us who are at least half aware of the monstrosities taking place, allegedly in our interests,give us an outlet to shout our concerns,but we are no more than one mosquito in the jungle.Until the shit hits the fan for EVERYONE,how is it going to change?
Harry, my false modesty commands that I profusely thank you for your flattering comment.
How is it going to change?
Once upon a time, I was rather confident that we might get ourselves on a trajectory of continual, if uneven and fiercely contested improvement. Reason, so I thought, would prevail.
That obviously did not happen: the contest over who shall occupy the most powerful political office in the world was conducted over hallucinatory claims of Haitian refugees stealing and eating people’s cats and dogs. Meaning that the world’s most powerful political office is unlikely to remain the world’s most powerful political office for much longer. A kind of a “The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire” type thingy – and in the grand scheme of things, that’s not so bad?
For us individually, it’s going to get a lot worse before it will get better.
My point is that that the insights it would have taken to establish and pursue an agenda of continual improvement are the same insights that are required to rebuild the world after its now impending demise. And to me, they look like the insights that might enable individuals better to weather the coming storm.
Also: I’m venting!
Also: I still harbour some residual ideas about serendipity. Maybe I get lucky in ways I can’t anticipate.
And at any rate: trying to fit myself back into this inane racket is simply not an option. Someone smarter than myself observed that “The human mind is not elastic. Once it has expanded to comprehend a new concept, it never shrinks back to its original size.”
Harry, unfortunately, it could take a collapse to bring about change.
That seems to be a long way off or impossible, but I noted here a few weeks back the warning from the economist Michael Hudson that the alleged capitalism virtue of self-correction after the regular crises of capitalism, might have reached its end-point.
In the past when crises looked like getting out of control, major wars allowed a complete restart.
But a major war today means nuclear, which no-one wants. So we are seeing the alleged corrections after each crisis alright, but we start the next round of growth from a higher and higher level of debt.
Hudson reckons the limit of that debt level has been reached.
Will we see the collapse of a Ponzi scheme?
That’s all from memory. I could have a detail or an emphasis wrong.
That’s what Elon Musk worries about. He reckons Bitcoin is the answer.
Maybe if he teams up with Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler, and they cook up some “Sovereign FiatCoin”?
Thanks chaps, I used to have these conversations with a couple of mates 45 years ago, to the extent that we fled to North Queensland in the vain hope that we’d see out the end of the world in self sufficient bliss…wrong move, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.Another adventure, another learning curve,in fact I could recount a biblical length series of foolhardy moves that would rival the downfall of Rome.Minus the togas. The thing that keeps me going is a loving family..including even a new great grandson,and is why we must not give up.Sorry to wax maudlin.
Arnd, never mind the false modesty,just enjoy the kudos.
Harry, Arnd to an extent is correct when he’s confesses to venting. We all do it. Internet nooks like this are the 21stC version of the village square where the old & retired could share companionably with others over a coffee or retsina, whinge about whatever, philosophise, ruminate, fly kites and so on.
I don’t think anyone here is under any illusion that what gets written down is going to have any impact on the greater forces that move economies and people at significant scale.
I think I may have made the point, several times possibly, that nothing can change until people themselves change; society is nothing more than the larger expression of what constitutes personal psychology; if we are driven by what have been termed the seven deadly sins then it stands to reason that there’s little to no wriggle room available for improvement.
Unfortunately we live in a time of deep hypnotism; it’s not as if there is no way forward but the path is narrow and the great majority of humanity is simply unaware of the opportunities for escape from this awful mechanicality and attention-sucking focus on the outer world with all its material attractions and struggles.
All the great teachers insisted on the imperative to know one’s self; self inquiry, the persistent and patient indwelling that may lead to awakening. Very few of us are willing to undertake this journey, and consequently we are constantly swayed by the impressions of the external world, which, self-evidently, would appear to be taking many of us to hell in a handbasket.
Anyway, the intelligent ape, the chattering monkey called ‘man’ loves to talk, even if there’s no real outcome for his efforts. The ongoing COP phenomenon proves that; millions of words, soberly signed declarations of intent; all done while global warming ramps up and disasters increase in frequency and consequence and the fossil fuel corps remain committed to extraction & refinement.
I guess we could all just bite our tongues, so to speak, as in STFU, but that’s not going to happen.
I thank you for your appreciation, and for your sage observations.
Kanga, out.
Hey Harry, I enjoyed reading of your NQ adventures.
I had a bit more luck than you.
I came to NQ over 50 years ago, looking for love, adventure, and the meaning of life, and found all three!
And I’m still here!
If you’re wondering about the meaning of life bit, check out Kanga’s comment — he’s got it straight.
Test
Much to elaborate on and economist Noah Smith had interesting insight into the now, IMO, mythical nostalgia for the working class; Brexit too.
Electoral demographic profiles are now upside pyramids, with middle aged, boomers & seniors dominant, for now, before ‘the great replacement’ rebalances populations.
Perversely middle aged &/or retirees with guaranteed minimum income, describe themselves as ‘working class’ vs working age ‘elites’; Orwellian and allows dominant older to think of act as victims of younger educated elites and the future?
Hence, RW MSM caters and promotes to the same ‘pensioner populism’, ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘maintain the rage’ (copyright Whitlam, used by Howard & The Voice No campaign).
Smith’s article with great graphic from Pew how middle class falsely describe themselves as working class
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-doesnt-really-have-a-working
Lucy has here, and previously, used the term neo-feudal to describe what’s happening, and I have a feeling I might have used it once or twice myself, but my memory has been jogged by recent references to Peter Kropotkin, and I now feel that the term does not adequately describe the downward spiral we have begun.
Inadequate, because it implies that we are going back to a former era of no freedom, no democracy and terrible conditions. But feudal times were by no means unfree. Feudal times were by no means undemocratic. And by and large people could eat. There was no institutionalised deprivation as we see today.
In his Mutual Aid — A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin devoted two chapters to the development of the medieval cities. This is a fascinating story of rebellion against the rising power of kings and princes, and the retention by common folk of customary practices of land-use and justice that were based on community solidarity, community values, and democracy.
The will to resist the power of royalty came from long held traditions.
He wrote “The moral authority of the commune was so great that even at a much later epoch, when the village communities fell into submission to the feudal lord, they maintained their judicial powers; they only permitted the lord, or his deputy, to “find” the above conditional sentence in accordance with the customary law he had sworn to follow, and to levy for himself the fine (the fred) due to the commune. But for a long time, the lord himself, if he remained a co-proprietor in the waste land of the commune, submitted in communal affairs to its decisions. Noble or ecclesiastic, he had to submit to the folkmote — Even when the peasants became serfs under the lord, he was bound to appear before the folkmote when they summoned him.”
The footnote in support of that reads “Maurer (Gesch. der Markverfassung, sections 29, 97) is quite decisive upon this subject. He maintains that “All members of the community… the laic and clerical lords as well, often also the partial co-possessors (Markberechtigte), and even strangers to the Mark, were submitted to its jurisdiction” (p. 312). This conception remained locally in force up to the fifteenth century.”
Kropotkin writes later in regard to justice — “Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction. In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him — which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him? And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him. Now, they accepted the king’s or the lord’s official whom they could not refuse; but they maintained the folkmote’s jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord’s judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great (Charlemagne) was surrounded could not abolish it; they were bound to confirm it.”
Democracy was a feature in the medieval workplace, even on board trading vessels. Here is an address by a skipper to all on board immediately after leaving port, as reported at the time —
“‘As we are now at the mercy of God and the waves,’ he said, ‘each one must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded by storms, high waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a strict order that we may bring our voyage to a good end. That is why we shall pronounce the prayer for a good wind and good success, and, according to marine law, we shall name the occupiers of the judges’ seats (Schöffenstellen).’ Thereupon the crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their judges. At the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini abdicated their functions and addressed the crew as follows: — ‘What has happened on board ship, we must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt und ab sein lassen). What we have judged
right, was for the sake of justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name of honest justice, to forget all the animosity one may nourish against another, and to swear on bread and salt that he will not think of it in a bad spirit. If any one, however, considers himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt and ask justice from him before sunset.’ On landing, the Stock with the fred fines was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution among the poor.”
This determined retention of customary and democratic practices was a feature across Europe. From the Mediterranean to the Baltic, from the east to Ireland.
The connection or relevance of feudal conditions to the situation we face today is that yes, those in power are slowly removing the gains that working people have won — public services, workplace rights, employment options, the list is endless.
The difference today to feudal times is that we do not have the traditions of community self-organisation that sustained the common folk as they resisted the elite forces. Those traditions crumbled with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the use of the legislature to force the starving masses from the countryside to the cities to become wage slaves, to feed “the Satanic mills.”
So if this is not a return to feudalism, are we entering a period with no historical similarity?
Not at all. Such a period has just been mentioned.
We appear to be returning to the conditions that prevailed during the Industrial Revolution. That period when an extremely wealthy class dictated the working conditions and life trajectory of the masses.
But we will not hear widespread condemnation of “a return to industrial revolution conditions” or of a return to “Dickensian squalor” from the centrist commentariat because that’s when the theories of liberal economics began their full flowering. When liberals took control.
Liberal economic theory provided justification for expropriation by the wealthy from the national wealth. And what we see today is obscene levels of wealth being extracted from national productivity by a new class of elites.
The wheel has turned full circle. From the obscenely wealthy industrial magnates of the industrial revolution, to the “We’re all socialists now” after WW2, back to the obscenely wealthy dot-com billionaires who want to dictate terms. Terms favourable to them.
This is not a return to feudal conditions. We are witnessing, and feeling the pain, of liberals going back to their roots. Libs doing what libs do best.
Some might argue, as in the article, that this is all down to neo-liberalism and that neo-liberalism has no connection to liberalism. Yes, you could say that if you insist on detaching yourself from the past 250 years of history.
Thanks for that review, Steve. You are correct in calling out the term “neo-feudalist” as imprecise and potentially quite misleading.
As against that, I remind you of Marx’s quip that “History always repeats twice. First as tragedy, then as farce.” In that sense, calling out our present socio-economic arrangements as a “tragi-farcical re-enactment of crudely abridged mores of past societies” is probably quite apposite.
On a different, but closely related note, I just happened across a Guardian article from last year: Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?.
The comments section had been monopolized by a bunch of opinionated old fogeys essentially ventilating the same points we are making here. Worth reading, I guess. Even if only to give us more reason to chuckle about our own irrelevance.
I thought I point out JamesValencia, 22 Dec 2023 2.22, who makes my previous point:
Also, I believe that the People’s Republic of Mallacoota may have found the going easier if they had more radically divested themselves of some of the widely prevalent, yet badly mistaken basic precepts that underpin our destructive contemporary bourgeois order.
Our exchanges here may in fact have a beneficial impact after all.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
Thanks for that info Arnd.
I thought my reference to “community-based organisation” might resonate with you. 🙂
I must repeat…read Tim Winton’s ‘Juice’ to give us an idea about the coming apocalypse of failing to deal with climate change.Our ‘Leaders,’ and our politicians are dumb captives of the neoliberal hoax, so eloquently illustrated by the election of a frightful facsimile of a humanoid,with every fault known to mankind. Nature will have it’s revenge,as we can already attest.But hey, think about the money.
Arnd, while I think about it,you’ll find this kind of reference ,regarding Zuckerberg, in Winton’s alarming, dystopian novel.
A refresher for the likes of Steve Davis & Arnd… George Monbiot on capitalism.
.
Thanks for nothing Skippy.
After reading the Monbiot article I’m depressed again. 🙂
Nah, it’s actually very good — one to file away.
He’s a very good essayist, not so good at the book form.
You would have run across Alan Watts, Eastern philosophy aficionado, who had the same problem.
Canguro … ? I thought you were handing out piña coladas, finger food and lemon-scented moist towelettes! Instead you serve up an article on perfidious capitalism by George Monbiot. Some “refresher”!
I went back to the article to book-mark it, and it turns out that I did already.
It did sound familiar – a short version of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
I would love to comment, but some times the truth is so unadorned and grey that I have to look away.
The Aussie cricket team, I can dig what they might be feeling. How can things fall apart to crap so quickly sometimes?