TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
Introduction: The
meaning of the term ‘underclass’
The spontaneous
uprising of the British 'underclass' was, of course, easily
crushed by the massive force of the state amassed against
it, illustrating one of the main lessons of History once
more: that spontaneous uprisings can never overturn a
socio-economic system (as opposed to its political
personnel), if they are not backed by an organised political
movement with its own antisystemic project, its own vision
of the future society and a transitional strategy for moving
from here to there.
However, it is important to assess the importance of this
insurrection – which is neither the first (see e.g. the
similar insurrections in France[1]
and Greece[2]
a couple of years ago) nor, of course, the last, as even a
systemic magazine like
Spiegel
acknowledges[3]
– and, in the process, to try to interpret its causes and
effects. In fact, all these insurrections by what we may
call the ‘underclass’, to my mind, represent the long
overdue backlash of the main victims of neoliberal
globalisation and particularly those who have not yet been
integrated into it, despite the good efforts of the
reformist Left, or what I call the degenerate “Left”.[4]
But first, we need to clarify the meaning of ‘underclass’,
as it is obviously not used here in the usual pejorative
sense to imply the ‘poor’ or ‘lumpen’ (proletariat) –
the meaning that we see so often in various analyses
throughout the systemic mass media. Instead, we should take
‘underclass’ to mean the victims of neoliberal globalisation
par excellence, i.e. the unemployed and the marginalised,
those living close to subsistence level and particularly the
youngsters with no future: in a word, the present-day
sans culottes,
who do not belong to any of the established social classes
as they have not (yet) been integrated into the social
system of the internationalised market economy and its
political complement, representative ‘democracy’ – unlike
the working class, for example, who have been integrated
into it to various degrees. Therefore, the underclass are
very dangerous to the elites, not because they could
overthrow the system, but because they force the elites into
taking inevitable counter-action to crush their frequent
insurrections, thereby revealing the true nature of what
passes for "democracy" today — a political system which
ultimately relies on physical violence to reproduce the
economic violence on
which it is founded. Furthermore, the elites’ backlash could
lead other social groups who are presently only partly
integrated into the system (low-income, occasional or
part-time employees, etc.) to take part in the insurrections
of the future and/or – even worse for the elites – to
organise themselves ‘from below’ with the aim of overcoming
the trade unions and parties controlled by the system and
creating an antisystemic movement.
The insurrections of the future, if motivated by an
antisystemic project like the Inclusive Democracy project,
could in turn establish the conditions for a future society
with an equal distribution of all forms of power, i.e.
without power relations or structures — the ultimate cause
of every aspect of the present multi-dimensional crisis.[5]
The “criminality” of the insurrectionists
vs. the real criminality of the elites
The insurrection
of the British underclass was seen by the entire British
establishment and their followers – the bourgeois class and,
particularly, the petty bourgeoisie – as a case of ‘pure
criminality’. In other words, the real criminals of the
political, economic and cultural elites have condemned the
victims of their own criminality and have been both
demanding and taking the worst kind of revenge on them for
revolting against a system which has been destroying their
lives since the day they were born. Of course, this is not
surprising considering that, throughout History, the ruling
elites and the privileged social groups have labelled the
people who have revolted against them as criminals, from the
French and Russian revolutions to the Spanish and Greek
civil wars. Thus:
·
the entire British political system,
i.e. the war criminals of the Labour Party who did not
hesitate to destroy the people of Iraq,[6]
among others, or the corresponding criminals of the Tory
party, who were similarly keen to destroy the people of
Libya[7]
-- the aim being, in both cases, fully to integrate the
respective oil-rich countries into the internationalised
market economy— played a leading role in creating tremendous
hysteria against the underclass, presumably because they
ought to have been content with their lot! This despite the
fact that, under today’s parody of democracy called
representative “democracy”, the underclass have no
effective way of expressing their discontent, given that
both main parties succeeding
one another in power implement exactly the same sort of
policies (with minor variations) – i.e. those that
neoliberal globalisation requires;
·
the real economic criminals (bankers,
financiers, etc.) who created the 2007-8 financial crisis,
as well as the present recession[8]
under which the states intervened to save private banking at
the expense of social spending and the remnants of the
welfare states (while the profits of the economic elites and
the bonuses of the bankers et. al. have continued to
increase), now turn against the petty thieves who have been
stealing in order to meet the needs that the system itself
has created. The present-day “Misérables” are called
“criminal” and are consequently awarded long prison
sentences by an economic system which does not give every
citizen the means to meet the needs that it creates but
which, instead, privileges some and condemns others to a
life of mere survival and anomie through no fault of their
own or of their parents;
·
the systemic mass media (which have
already been conquered by
huge financial conglomerates[9]),
whose role in promoting the criminal
wars of the political elites and the need for “austerity”
measures hitting the lower income groups particularly hard –
supposedly in order to “save the economy” – is well known.
It is no wonder that, today, all the systemic media
massively promote the argument that the insurrections
represent ‘pure criminality’, while their real systemic
causes are not even mentioned, and even the most liberal
media only stress the consequences of neoliberal
globalisation (in terms of the cuts in social spending, or
in police numbers!) and never neoliberal globalisation
itself!
So, no surprises
there, although the despicable stand of the Labour party
does show how far this ex-social-democratic party has moved
towards social fascism.[10]
Not surprisingly, even a liberal newspaper like the
Independent
needed to stress in a leading article that:
Less predictable, perhaps, was the near-unanimity on parade
in Parliament on Thursday, where MPs from all parties vied
to identify a malaise that stemmed, as they saw it, from a
destructive moral laxity pervading Britain. From parenting
to education to policing, a cross-party consensus called for
discipline, toughness and the re-establishment and
enforcement of boundaries.[11]
However, what
was even more surprising was the stance of ‘neutrality’ if
not ‘tolerance’ shown by the trade unions and the working
class in general towards this stand of the Labour party and
British society’s associated trend towards full
totalitarianism, which is promoted by the British
establishment. Particularly so when this establishment, not
content with the mass arrests of thousands of the members of
the underclass who took part in the insurrection and the
expected imposition of the hardest possible prison sentences
on most of them by the bourgeois justice system (creating
the need for even more prisons to accommodate them and
therefore faithfully following the example of the USA, the
nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world[12]),
have now proceeded to impose social punishments, on top of
the heavy penalties already imposed, which involve depriving
the insurgents’ families of the right to social housing and
making them homeless once again![13]
Clearly, Les “Misérables”
of the 18th century is being replayed with a
vengeance at the beginning of the 21st![14]
The “squares”
movement and the return of traditional insurrections with a
vengeance
Yet, the
insurrection of the English ‘underclass’ has also revealed a
fact of high significance as regards the resistance to
capitalist neoliberal globalisation. For the last six months
or so, the degenerate “Left” have systematically been
promoting the disorienting view that peaceful demonstrations
like those of the indignados in Spain or the
aganaktismenoi (outraged) in Greece[15]
represent a new dawn of social radicalism that could even
lead to the overthrow of neoliberal globalisation, similar
to the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes.
However, this is a completely distorted view of events
designed to justify the integration, initially, of the
Tunisian and Egyptian peoples into the New World Order of
neoliberal globalisation and representative ‘democracy’[16]
through their ‘liberation’ from tyrannical regimes and,
presently, the similar integration of the Spanish and Greek
peoples through the “Left’s” systematic effort to defuse the
grenade represented by the massive unemployment and poverty
that their integration into the New World Order implies.
Clearly, the squares movement within the ‘Arab Spring’ had
nothing to do with the overthrow of the system itself, as
the main enemy of this movement was just a tyrannical
version of the system and the peoples of these countries
still aspire to representative ‘democracy’, given that they
have never really experienced it. In other words, it was
exactly because the interests of foreign and local elites
coincided with those of the demonstrators at the squares
that the overthrow of Mubarak and Ben Ali (with the decisive
help of the Egyptian and Tunisian armies which are fully
controlled by the transnational elite) was made possible. On
the other hand, the peoples of Spain and Greece are directly
or indirectly opposed to neoliberal globalisation itself,
and therefore any attempt to fool them by replacing the
pseudo-socialists, Papandreou and Zapatero, with other
members of the system’s political personnel is doomed to
failure, given the long experience of representative
‘democracy’ that these peoples have had.
The insurrection
of the British underclass, however, has clearly shown that
peoples in despair are resorting to historical forms of
rebellion again. This is because they know full well that
these uprisings can never be ignored by the elites, like the
peaceful demonstrations in the squares can be – which are
praised by the elites and the systemic media and which now
even include the peaceful demonstration of the "progressive"
Zionist Israeli middle class on the
Rothschild Boulevard of central Tel Aviv[17],
ignoring (of course!) even the fundamental rights not just
of the Palestinians, but also of the Arab-Israelis who
constitute 20% of the population of Israel. Such praise by
the elites and their media for these peaceful demonstrations
is not surprising, given that, as we saw above, the
uprisings are much more harmful to them than the peaceful
demonstrations in the squares could ever be.
How can neoliberal globalisation be overthrown?
It is economic violence that pushed
the English underclass to physical violence and looting
during the era of neoliberal globalisation, since their
anger, indirectly if not directly, was aimed at the terrible
inequality created by capitalist globalisation. An
inequality that has assumed Victorian dimensions in Britain
today, as a recent report showed according to which
the household wealth (including cars and other possessions)
of the top 10% of the population is 100 times higher than
the wealth of the poorest 10%![18]
Members of the underclass rightly perceive – albeit often
subconsciously – the nature of neoliberal globalisation,
which is summarised accurately by
Charles Moore, the High Tory former Daily Telegraph editor
and official biographer of Baroness Thatcher:[19]
The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate
capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The
freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply
have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more
insecure, to enrich the few.
In other words,
the underclass implicitly realise that the overthrow of
capitalist neoliberal globalisation is not a matter of
overthrowing some evil conspirators and their catastrophic
policies which, supposedly, simply reflect some criminal
“dogma” based on a new capitalist “strategy”, but it is
actually a matter of overthrowing the very same system of
the market economy, whose dynamics have inevitably led to
the present globalisation! So, neoliberal globalisation is
neither the outcome of a conspiracy nor of some dogma
adopted by ‘bad’ economists and politicians, as is
misleadingly claimed by the reformist Left and through such
channels as Naomi Klein’s best-seller[20]
putting forward a conspiracy “theory” on neoliberal
globalisation, which is heavily promoted by the systemic
mass media and
which (not accidentally!) won the systemic
Warwick Prize for Writing (2008/9).
Instead, it can be shown to be the outcome of the dynamics
of the capitalist market economy, which is now
institutionalised on a global scale by the transnational
elite, either “peacefully” through the international
institutions they control (IMF, World Bank, EU, etc.), or by
force (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), with the obvious aim of
integrating every country into the internationalised market
economy. Therefore, contrary to these utterly naïve (if not
also dangerously disorienting) views, as I tried to show
elsewhere,[21]
neoliberal globalisation is a SYSTEMIC phenomenon and can
only be reversed through the overthrow of the institutions
on which it is founded – in particular, the open and
‘liberalised’ markets of capital, labour, goods and services
(the “four liberties”, as they are euphemistically called in
the Maastricht Treaty on which the EU is founded!).
This, in turn,
can only happen when the capitalist market economy is
replaced by a new system for allocating resources, which is
neither based on the market system nor on central planning,
both of which are historically bankrupt. Instead, it should
be based on an economic democracy, as part of an Inclusive
Democracy in which citizens’ assemblies would determine the
allocation of scarce resources in such a way as to secure
both the satisfaction of all citizens’ basic needs according
to need and their non-basic needs according to the principle
of freedom of choice.[22]
The obvious
conclusion is that the first step towards such a society is
the breaking of each country’s economic links with the
internationalised market economy and the creation of the
preconditions for a self-reliant (not autarchic!) economy,
which would rely mainly on indigenous economic resources to
meet the needs of its own people, while engaging in
bilateral or multilateral relations (within an economic
union of countries at a similar level of economic
development) to cover those needs that could not be met
locally. This is not localism, of course, but a new genuine
internationalism based on the principles of solidarity and
collective autonomy, rather than on individualism and the
greed for profit, as at present.[23]
It is confederations of self-reliant Inclusive Democracies
which could really overthrow the present catastrophic system
of neoliberal globalisation and lead to a new international
society based on self-determination, involving no
exploitation, poverty, mass unemployment or wars to impose
the power of transnational or local elites.
[5]
Takis
Fotopoulos,
Towards An Inclusive Democracy, The Crisis of the
Growth Economy and the Need
for a New
Liberatory Project, (London/New York: Cassell/Continuum,
1997); see also
The
Multidimensional Crisis and Inclusive Democracy,
(IJID, 2005),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/
[8]
see
Takis Fotopoulos “The “new world order” hype and the
new version of social-liberalism”,
The International Journal
of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 5, No. 2, (Spring 2009),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol5/vol5_no2_takis_new_world_order_hype.htm
and
“The myths
about the economic crisis, the reformist Left and
economic democracy,”
The
International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 4, No. 4, (October 2008),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no4_takis_economic_crisis.htm
[11]
Leading article, “Liberalism
has improved Britain – its defenders must speak up”,
Independent,
11/8/2011.
[13]
Alistair Keely, “Councils set to evict rioters”, and
Kevin Rawlinson and Genevieve Roberts, “Mother of
man arrested in riots is served with eviction
notice”,
Independent, 11/8/2011.
[14]
see e.g. Matt Blake,
“On
the rap sheet: 'looter' who pocketed £1, and a
suspect caught with an empty box”,
Independent,
11/8/2011.
[16]
see
Takis Fotopoulos, “The
pseudo-revolution in Libya and the Degenerate
“Left”, Parts I & II.
[17]
Tobias Buck,
“Israel’s
middle-class revolt hits fresh peak”,
Financial
Times, 12/8/2011.
[18]
National Equality Panel
Report (John Hill’s Report),
An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the
UK,
(2010); see, also,
Amelia Gentleman’s report, “Unequal
Britain: richest 10% are now 100 times better off
than the poorest”, (Guardian,
27/1/2010).
[19]
Quoted by
Stefan Stern
(professor of management practice at Cass Business
School, London), “Marx
was right about change”,
Independent,
16/8/2011.
[20]
Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(2007) or see e.g.
Φώτη Τερζάκη, “Ο
νεοφιλελευθερισμός ως έγκλημα κατά της
ανθρωπότητας”, (Βιβλιοθήκη, “Ε”, 21/5/2011).
[23]
see Takis Fotopoulos,
“The Latin-Americanization of Greece and the lessons
for the European South”,
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 6, No. 2/3, (Spring/Summer 2010),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol6/vol6_no2_takis_latin_americanization_greece_south.htm;
see also “The
transition to an Inclusive Democracy”,
The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 6, No. 2/3, (Spring/Summer 2010),
http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol6/vol6_no2_takis_ID_meeting_Barcelona_2010.htm