This is not for the faint-hearted. To be honest, in the immortal words of Slartibartfast, it scares the willies out of me.
Over the past few centuries humanity has made massive progress, however you want to measure it, from health and life expectancy, literacy, extension of the vote and basic human rights (ref 1). But let’s face it, having societies that even seriously try to work for the many are rare in human history. Most of the time we the masses merely exist as “objects” to serve our rulers. That’s because the natural state of human societies is for all power, both the “economic” power you get from owning things, and the “political” power that derives from being able to make and enforce the rules, to reside in the same hands. Those with economic power buy the political power (politicians, the media, political parties or, failing all of that, mercenaries) while those with political power use it to steal the economic power. (And yes, the solution to this problem is to spread the economic and political power reasonably equally amongst all of us, i.e. democratic or even libertarian socialism).
It seems that the progressive project, the “Enlightenment” if you like, was not the result of the inevitable “progress” of history, but of the fact that, for a time, in Europe, the usual landed elite had to compete with a newly emerging commercial and industrial elite that arose because of technological developments and the very earliest phases of European driven globalisation (plenty of negative consequences too of course, such as the genocide of the Amerindians and the African slave trade). Both sides in this power struggle sought to enlist the support of the masses by promising concessions, but particularly the rising, assertive “commercial” elite, as it was easy for that class to play down its emerging elite pretensions and to make apparently common cause with the masses against the then acknowledged rulers of society. The result was eventually, for a time, societies that actually seriously attempted to serve the needs of the many, and not just have the many serve the needs of the few. But this was really just the outcome of an accidental and transient divergence of political and economic power, of a splitting of the elites.
Really, Whig and Marxist interpretations of history, as we march unstoppably towards the sunlit uplands, are at least 90% just comforting fairy stories.
In the end, in differing places and times and in various ways, the conflicts between “trade and land” came to an end. The surviving and emerging elites would never again underestimate the disruptive power of technological change. Instead they would, of course, use their power to place those technologies under their own influence and control as quickly as possible, and then use the new technologies for their own ends. The latest phases of globalisation, starting with railroads and continuing all the way to the world wide web, has seen that elite itself globalise. Able to play nation states off against each other to drive down taxes and create tax havens, and to seek the cheapest, most exploitable, sources of labour, that global elite has become extremely wealthy (ref 2). Challenged by environmental activism that elite has funded climate change denial, and when frustrated by the attempts of still not entirely subjugated nation-states to counter the global elites through international co-operation, they have whipped up nationalism and xenophobia (ref 3). Now we live in a time where economic and political power are rapidly re-converging, an era of new “strong men” and fading democracies(ref 4).
Of course all this should really be seen as a system just relaxing back to its equilibrium state. Or more prosaically, because, remember, those with economic power buy the political power, and those with political power steal the economic power, situation normal.
There is another aspect to this normality: a dynamic so universal that, like background noise, it passes unnoticed. Sometimes elites continually struggling for more wealth and power can seem not just greedy, but insane. Why should those who already have so much still struggle to acquire even more? But that insanity itself seems inexplicable as, though a disproportionate number amongst the elite may be sociopathic (ref 5), most are not. Except that, in reality, this continual accumulation of more wealth and power is entirely rational: in fact the only ways members of the elite, and their families, can survive. That’s because members of the elites are always competing with each other. A capitalist must always seek to grow businesses faster than competitors, or be disastrously out-grown, just as a warlord must keep conquering extra land and people to raise ever larger armies, or be conquered. Elite families losing this struggle risk sinking out of the elite into the “masses”: of becoming the exploited rather than the exploiting. For most of human history, however, and in many gangster states in the contemporary world, the consequences of losing a power struggle are even worse: they are extermination.
The main resource the elites have in their struggles among themselves is quite simple. It is us. The elite that can more effectively dispossess or exploit its subjugated masses has more resources at its disposal than one that does not. Even when and where elites and their masses generate mutual arrangements that benefit both, the elite that can use these “win-win” solutions to win even more for itself will outcompete elites that do not. The most successful parasite does not kill its host, but it will still always maximise the resource it can extract.
Competition within and between elites means that the basic dynamic of hierarchical societies is therefore one of persistent top-down class war.
Now combine all the above the above with a further thought. Elites have always tended to treat their masses poorly, even when they are dependent on the labour of those masses. So how do you think the mass of humanity will fare in a world, just decades away now, when the workers have been replaced with AI, where Amazon, Tesla and possibly Google dominate the rest of the Solar System and the richest, from merely being able to consider themselves a separate species, actually have the tech to transform themselves into another (most likely also ageless) species? When the masses, far from being useful, are now not only a drain on a fragile environment, but an actual political threat?
Then throw in dangerous climate change, and, on Earth in any case, various potentially critical shortages, even for such basics as water. Add in more pandemics, spreading from mega-city to crowded mega-city via ever improving transport links, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. With the elites doing their best to ensure that, whatever the cost to everyone else, they survive with their power and privilege intact, including grabbing even more power and privilege so that they can best assure that outcome?
Many members of the global elite, and their closest advisors, are already arguing for a rolling back of democracy (ref 6), even for a new “Dark Enlightenment” (ref 7). Predatory elites are as likely to cause our extinction as climate change: indeed the two problems are currently deeply compounded.
Arguably, the Enlightenment is now proving so fragile that the only way to head off the “Disenlightenment”, to avoid a long lasting new equilibrium state of re-convergence of political and economic power in the hands of single global elite, and the accompanying semi-passive genocide of the bulk of humanity (ref 8), seems to be to complete the Enlightenment project by complementing political democracy with some form of economic democracy, so that economic as well as political power can be shared equally. In other words, as stated above, democratic, even libertarian, socialism.
The issue we now face is therefore no parlour game. It isn’t an academic exercise. It isn’t just about compassion, though of course that’s still important. It isn’t just about justice, and certainly not about trying to petulantly impose on reality a fairness it can never sustain. No, this is about holding back the dark. Fighting the Disenlightenment. It’s about survival, of the bulk of the human race, of ourselves, of anything that could ever pass as civilised values (ref 9).
Basically it’s democratic socialism or mass death, including the end of all forms of democracy and mutual decency and respect, at least until the super-rich survivors re-invent it for themselves.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Sources and Further Reading
(1) For an excellent survey of the progress now at risk, read Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness”.
(2) For example: https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-shocking-facts-about-extreme-global-inequality-and-how-even-it
(3) An example: https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/06/07/brexit-climate-denier-map
(4) For example: https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/what-do-about-neo-authoritarians-ingredients-political-response
(6) For a general commentary, see: https://www.salon.com/2016/08/11/plutocrats-make-it-clear-capitalism-trumps-democracy-why-some-free-marketeers-actually-like-dictators/
(7) http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/
(8) For a sketch of how this could play out in practice, see the descriptions of the “Jackpot” in William Gibson’s novel “The Peripheral”.
(9) For a framework for reviving the Enlightenment project, see the rest of this blog., starting with some fundamentals, at https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/questions-and-some-answers-how-to-live-with-yourself-and-others/ . For what these ideas may mean for the way we should order economic affairs, including the use and abuse of the “market”, see: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/what-is-economic-justice-and-how-can-we-create-it/ . For further elaboration, and a more detailed discussion of “progress” in history, see: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/questions-an-addendum/
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