Blog di rivincita sociale

(All the essays and books mentioned in the Table of content below are available in the Livres-Books or International Political Economy sections of the site www.la-commune-paraclet.com. The « Appeal » is in the March 2014 Archives of http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org. The second and eighth are now being translated into English. Hopefully, once day, they will eventually all be edited properly … Such as they are, they should be worthy of your attention.)

 

ANOTHER AMERICA IS POSSIBLE:

or The sorry end of the Reaganite-Monetarist cycle.

(In praise of the social thought of Thomas Paine et al.)

Introduction: Trump between war and peace. (see below) 

Are false flags to be feared and, if so, in what form will they come? (February 4^th, 2017) (Please, use the term « flags» in the search function to go to this chapter)

HISTORICAL MEMORY IS A DUTY: WHAT DO I MEAN BY THE PHRASE « PHILO-SEMITE NIETZSCHEAN » ? December7, 2016 (Please, use the term « Nietzschean» in the search function to go to this chapter)

1)    The socio-economic consequences of MM. Volcker, Reagan and Co. (1985) (see below)

2)    Tous ensemble or United We Stand (1998) (still to be translated)

3)    Nietzsche as an awakened nightmare (Dec. 15, 2002)

4)    Heidegger, the ultimate corruption of the soul and of Human becoming. (2013)

5)    Keynesianism, Marxism, Economic  Stability and Growth (2005) (It includes my ECOMARXIST theory.)

6)    Excerpt from For Marx, against nihilism/Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme, Part Two: For a Marxist psychoanalysis theory. (Dec. 2001)

7)    In Praise of Reason and of the Secular State (January 2004)

8)    Brief notes on Joachim of Fiore as a Pythagorean (August 267, 2016) (To go directly to the text use «Joachim» in the search function)

9)    Marriage, civil unions and the institutionalisation of customs ( May 16, 2004) – Available in English; use the word « customs » in the search function to go to the text. Also available in French and in Italian in the Pink Part of www.la-commune-paraclet.com

10)                      Credit without collateral (March 20, 2008)

11)                      The Treasury and the Fed. Epilogue to my earlier essay ”Credit without collateral” followed by a Chronology of the financial crisis (April 1^st, 2008)

12)                      Hi-Ha! The bourgeois economist’s donkish visual hallucinations (August, 2009)

13)                      Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy (2012-2013)

14)                      The law of value, reproduction and socialist planning: Methodological introduction (Nov. 2012)

15)                      Marginalist Socialism, or how to chain oneself in the Capitalist cavern (Dec. 20/30, 2014).

16)                      Appeal (March 2014)

17)                      The Fed dilemma, or how the Marginalists are now trapped into their own shameful narrative (Sept/Oct., 2015)

Xxx

Introduction: Trump between war and peace. 

(Soon available. The thesis is this: Hegemonic speculation is now substituting speculative interest to profit, thus dictating the whole structure of costs and prices to the entire economic system. In the process, it destroys industry. This is aggravated by Marginalist statistics which are ontologically unable to differentiate between speculation and the real economy, or between money and credit. Thus all mainstream equations are fundamentally wrong, no matter what the various Rogoff or Blanchard like to pretend – of course, without ever having to defend their production function, hence their theories, in public against scientific scholars like myself (see, for instance, the odious censorship imposed on my in Ugeux’s Blog, denounced in this same site. Note that when you go against science you go against the wall, it is as simple as that, fortunately.)

The speculative financial sector has increased from an average of 3 % to close to 9 % in the USA since the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act which brought Volcker-Reagan’s deregulation and privatisation policies to their logical conclusion. The illusion is that you print money and you create wealth. Of course, it does not work this way. Even if Japanese and Chinese keep on buying – less and less – US Treasury bonds out of  pure self-interest …

Here, then, you have the new version of the class struggle fought by the big bourgeoisie in the USA, namely the financial speculative fraction, the multinational productive fraction and the national bourgeoisie. Include the public and para-public sectors sacrificed by the imbecilic Monetarist Public Policy which never understood that the legitimate role of the State – and thus of State intervention – derives from it being an essential and historically increasing part of the social division of labor. The State apparatuses, including public social ones, are necessary to maintain the micro-productivity of private and public enterprises as well as the macro-competitiveness of any given Social Formation within the World Economy.

The speculative choice enforced since1979-1981 has forced productive capital to maximise its international structures – organigrams  – thus sacrificing jobs in the USA. They out-sourced and delocalised while Wal-Mart tried to repeat the strategy of Ricardo’s Repeal of the Corn Laws in a very different context hence with disastrous consequences. As I had denounced from the beginning, asymmetric interdependency was a prejudiced fallacy put out by people like J. Nye and Keohane and their Trilateralist « soft power » kind of super-imperialism. It never had a chance given, for instance, that China is graduating more engineers than the USA etc …

Trump might unleashed an era of world peace and prosperity were he to negotiate a new anti-dumping rule as advocated in my Appeal(see below). The new definition of the anti-dumping would protect the three elements of the « global net revenue » of households, which includes, individual salary, « deferred salary » – i.e. UI, pensions and the likes – and transfers to the household in the form of universal access to social safety nets and public infrastructures. This would consolidate the paycheck contributions, thus saving Social Security and other social safety nets – something that had begun with the New Deal and the Just Society – and it would also consolidate the fiscal base hence helping to reduce the public debt. The new Administration equally needs to return to a modern form of Glass Steagall Act in order to subordinate the growth of speculative revenues to the growth of the real economy. Given the current hegemony of the so-called universal bank, the transition might include the reinforcement of the Dodd-Frank to force the adoption of adequate internal and functional prudential ratios before returning to the segregation of deposit banks from commercial banks.

Instead, he probably will choose war and thus destroy America’s rank in the world for good.

For instance, his ban on citizens form some Muslims countries can only be understood in the framework of his lunatic and dangerous policy aimed at moving the US embassy in Al-Quds –  or Jerusalem – from Tel Aviv. Against all known international law. If you want to rebuild the « temple » do it in Orlando, Florida, it will be more fitting. He also wants to take on Israel’s adversaries in the region – instead of cutting the huge American aid, which could be more useful to the American unemployed, until the colonization process is stopped and reversed to give peace a chance – and do away with the now superfluous and counterproductive ISIS sideshow which the US and the Mossad created in the first place and financed with the petro-monarchies’ dirty money. Hence, he fears blowbacks and tries to prevent the consequences. For the same reasons they had imagined Guantanamo outside of the USA to escape constitutional constraints …

As for the economic rank of the US in the World Economy – taking on Germany, China etc – the idea seems to be that trade wars have to become real wars!!! Is this another form of « fuzzy logic »? It seems to me that you cannot sell many sophisticated goods to countries that are destroyed by wars and regime change … Again, the new anti-dumping definition is a better choice.

Remember that Reagan’s and the Bushes’ great games abroad were miserably lost. And only increased the American public debt. (The crumbling of the USSR had nothing to do with them but instead it was the direct and predicted result of internal revisionist treason, especially the substitution of so called « Marginalist socialism » to Marxist scientific thought.)

So, « once again », the choice is between war or peace. Exclusivist logic demonstrates that the warmongers always end up in the same way. But you need to understand the world scientifically in order to understand this evidence. I am afraid these people have forgotten Nietzsche’s advice in Thus spoke Zarathustra. Their syphilitic Grand Master had warned them (« Hi-Ha!» he wrote ironically) not to end up believing themselves the narratives they invented to fool others! For instance Marginalism, the infra-tetramorph temple and churches ideologies etc etc. (see In Praise of Reason and the essay on Joachim of Fiore, below)

The problem remains over-representation. False democratic representation inevitably flows from it. If equality is sacred, overrepresentation is a crime against equality and against Human thought. One does not need to refer to the Law of Great Numbers to understand it. Through its ideological inbreeding and incestuous selections processes overrepresentation leads to self-inflicted cretinism and the substitution of brute force to intelligence and persuasion.

The USA might want to revisit G. Washington warnings on this crucial subject matter!

Paul De Marco, February 1, 2017)

XXX

1)    THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (A  five-part essay.)

Paul De Marco, March 1985

Copyright © March 1985 (The critical use of the content of this document is strongly encouraged and its quotation appreciated.)

Note: 

This quick overview was written in March 1985. It started as a simple letter to the Editor of a daily newspaper in Montréal. In a few hours its relative length imposed itself on me in the most natural fashion. In this epoch of triumphant « Reaganism », I felt the need to correct the too many ineptitudes permanently churned out by so many medias of all stripes. As you guessed, the daily newspaper in question did not know what to do with it. Neither did the local professors, who were so numerous then in monkeying the neat analysis derived from the « Candide » program. You can judge by yourself whether this brief summary of the question was honest and farseeing or not.

For details on the Fed policy at the time, the English reader can peruse Secrets of the Temple: how the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, by William Greider, Simon and Schuster, January 1989. Greider makes it clear that the insiders in the Fed knew they were triggering a « roller coaster » with their Monetarist policy change. But, of course, that was precisely the objective, the rest being an affair of self-serving crisis management. However, as predicted, things did not turn out exactly as planned. Now – beginning 2017 – the Reaganite-Monetarist counter-reform cycle is coming to its sad end.

XXX

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (I)

THE STRATEGY : THEY KILL HORSES, DON’T THEY? 

Everything is related to everything else, wrote Karl Mannheim. This entanglement is no longer the sign of a thought lacking discerning power but instead an epistemological necessity: The complexity of reality itself induces that of the thought that would pretend to apprehend it. The world view is undistinguishable from the actions imposed on it. This has never been truer than in the current World Economy. Once this is granted, the task consists in revealing the main mechanisms behind this intertwined reality, something which forces us to dance at the tune of Mr. Volcker’s strange waltz.

Like any good waltz, Mr. Volcker’s is a frolicking three step affair.  Its key floats like the interest rates. First step: Induced recession … to strike inflation in its very soul. Second step: Entice the repatriation of mad cap capitals by rising interest rates in the USA higher than decency would permit. Third step: Invocate growth in a vertiginous crescendo, sweeping one’s tightly embraced partners in the vortex. Of course, there are some variations; however Mr. Volcker favors galliard tunes and it so happens that many sensible feet are remorselessly stepped upon. With solemn gravity at his stand, Mr. de Larosière follows the movement and with the waving of his small baton exercises his due « surveillance ».

The Ball is in full swing, the Party gets wild. In his euphoria, less controlled than he might have wished, the Fed « Chairman » is stepping on many toes and on many flower beds forcing the General Director of the IMF to frown sternly pointing his little baton in his direction : « Good grief, my dear Mister Volcker, restrain yourself! Slow down a bit! While you keep on partying on other people’s back, the debt is skyrocketing ». « My dear Monsieur de Larosière, why spoil the party? As for the debt, it is no fault of mine; check instead with Ronald. As for now, for goodness sake, go back to your fiddlers on the roof  ».

With a pinch of sadness the General Director obliges: « Oh! If only I were lodged in New-York instead of Washington » he whispered. But the Party goes on. Vocker lets himself loose and fancies a new synthesis of the yo-yo game with the theory of his good friend Friedman: With some dexterity it will be grandiose. Meanwhile, Ron tenderly rocks his debt: « Little darling, you will turn out to be a giant» all the while dreaming of a magnificent firework in the star-spangled sky.

Cenotaph Keynesianism!  Good Maynard! Didn’t you dream of a more sophisticated show … perhaps the « Sleeping Beauty »? Alas, to palliate lack of imagination, these days we have to resort to preventive derision.

But beware, this is a great game that Volcker is trying to execute.  Despite some false notes, despite the oft erratic behavior of most Indexes and of money, poorly understood by most economists and other econometricians who happen to be here at a par with the neophytes, what is played follows a precise score cooked-up in Washington with careful rehearsing at the FED, the IMF and at Williamsburg.

It is well known, when the « logical » structures which uphold the systems begin to crumble and start appearing as vulgar solipsism, ideology and power relations dangerously spring to prominence. The thinking is different but none the less solid as proven by Volcker’s new score.  Soon after his inauguration at the head of the FED in October 1979, Mr. Volcker sang his paean against the deficit of the balance of payments and its consequences. The last vestiges of fixed exchange rates were defenestrated. With the election of Reagan, more gallant than a new Saint-Georges Mr. Volcker assaulted the inflationary dragon with the firm intention of slaughtering it even at the cost of a recession. Indeed, a worldwide recession soon materialised.  In August 1982, the quasi-bankruptcy of Mexico instilled a modicum of seriousness. Nonetheless, the elephant continued to let loose in the porcelain castle of Bretton Woods, but from now on the score would be preventively better studied.

From 1980 to 1982, the prices of goods traded internationally went down 20%, thus provoking a similar cut into the foreign currencies earned by Third World Countries. The Mexican crisis was only the tip of the iceberg. The shock-waves were strong. The so-called Third World fractured into Third and Fourth World. The latter, mostly African States with debts  around 6 % of GDP in a ratio of 1 to 1 with their export gains – ratios which they shared with the Socialist bloc countries – were abandoned to their destiny while traditional international aid was drastically cut. The first, mostly South-American countries displayed a more unfavorable ratio of 3.5 to 1 and were therefore threatening the solvency of lending commercial banks, mostly American in origin, and thus in a position to drag the IMF into the abyss. (1)

De Larosière had already been forced to pitch in during the in extremis bailout of Mexico. In November 29, 1982 he sounded the alarm bell: He warned that the world monetary system could not survive without « sound » economic policies being adopted by the Nations-States. For him the solution had to come from from the fight against inflation and from the economic reviving of the OECD countries which could then pull all the rest of the World out of the recession. «This is the only way to relaunch economic growth and international trade. This strategy implies a set of global and coordinated economic policies, including monetary restraints, fiscal discipline and various initiatives to do away with rigidities in the labor market and trade. However, these policies imply a transition period during which demand will be restrained, a choice which will impact the developing countries (sic!). This is the reason why the industrialized countries must assist these nations in carrying out their adjustment, notably through their commercial and international aid policies … » (2)

To be sure, what was proposed was a horse remedy; however Mr. De Larosière promised that the IMF « will exercise its surveillance », meaning with the help of the full battery of instruments necessary to impose « conditionality », thanks to which the IMF appropriates a right to judge all the macro-economic variables of a borrowing country. (3) Meanwhile, the IMF promised to raise its quotas, something it will accomplish at least in part in 1984.

From Williamsburg came an echo to the General Director statement. Washington announced a « global strategy » ordered along four principal axes: a) the implementation of efficient adjustment and development policies for borrowing countries; b) adequate public and private financing; c) liberalisation of markets; d) stimulation of world-wide growth. (4)

Global strategy? Certainly! Yet, one must distinguish between sheer wishes and reality, keeping in mind the concrete objectives really pursued. The socio-economic consequences of Mr. Volcker and Co’s policies are harsher.

The implementation of adjustment policies for borrowing countries, under IMF surveillance, gave birth to a distressing euphemism, namely « negative growth ». Concretely that meant a muzzled, nil or decreasing GDP materializing while production for export shot higher, in a context of massive devaluations. The bleeding populations were thus offered as expiatory victims to the gods of the IMF and of the Federal Reserve by increasingly repressive governments.

In these conditions, the propagandized public and private financing, merely amounts to a bailout of commercial banks under the aegis of the IMF. In realty, the liberalization of trade, that totem of an aggressive multilateralism, translates into a rising of protectionist measures ideated to protect the manufactured goods consumed in the USA and in the EEC. These went from 20 % in 1980 to 30 % in 1983, with an even more impenetrable Japan.  Not surprisingly the GATT agreements are shunned by many developing world countries and the North-South talks are stalled since Cancun (Mexico, 1981). The final coup de grâce came from Avenue Kleber.

In fact, the furthering of global economic growth means first and foremost a series of restructuration for the sole benefit of the USA, with the pretext that they and they alone, with the modest help of other OECD countries, can pull the rest of the world toward a era of restored prosperity. In truth, the Volcker/Reagan of this world have difficulty to accept the – very relative – demise of their country on the world scene.

Be it as it may, this nice Volckerian strategy has its Achilles heel: If Reagan made it possible with his sanguine lack of hesitation in triggering the preliminary recession, his insistence on military spending, risks to send all the players to the ground, transforming the frolicking and mundane dance into a « they kill horses don’t they » type of competition. For many, a good supply of brine won’t help. In fact, lately one could notice that both Volcker and de Larosière, each in his own way, was starting to suffered from the Achilles heel ailment with much recriminations. After all, hegemony has its costs … if not its duties.

Before going into the details of the stakes and consequences of the Volckerian strategy, we must briefly elucidate the historical context from which it derives.

REFERENCES:

 

1) Wicker,Tom, “A larger crisis”, New-York Times, Nov. 4, 1983, in

2) “De Larosière stresses no monetary system can substitute for sound economic policies”, IMF Survey, Nov. 29, 1982, in World politics 84/85.

3) “Conditionality”, IMF Survey, Nov. 82, in World politics 84/85.

4) “The Challenge of economic growth” an address by K.W. Dam, Deputy secretary of state, UNCTAD IV, Belgrade, Yugoslavia,

5) Claude Julien, in Le Monde Diplomatique, mars 1985.

 

XXX

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (II)

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT: ALL THE ROADS LEAD TO ABSURDITY 

The historical context of the Volckerian strategy is that of the rise and then the questioning of American hegemony over the so-called post-war Free-world.

Hegemony can simply be defined as a system of « domination » largely accepted by all concerned parties – or at least by their elites, a reserve which renders the statement less paradoxical. If any notion of exploitation is thus ideologically pushed aside, the strategy can only succeed when it appears legitimate and when it conciliate the privileges of power with its duties. It is precisely what J.M. Keynes justifiably reminded the American Vinson at the Savannah Summit (1946), during the inauguration of the IMF and the BIRD or World Bank. One hoped that the Good Ferries were present at creation, yet the menacing irruption of the wicked Ferry godmother Carabosse – who was equally part of the script – was still to be feared. If for nothing else than the insistence of Vinson to locate the twin institutions in Washington instead of New York. To the great annoyance of Keynes, this decision made clear that American political choices would soon weight on them heavily.

Since the Bretton Woods Conference (1944), the USA exercised their « domination » over international monetary policy, both as a privilege and as a duty, at least in appearance. Indeed, the new system was not without its defects: By fixing the parity of one once of Troy gold to $ 35.00 US, the greenback was established as the « leading currency », which meant that it could be accepted as a reserve currency by all other central banks. Simultaneously, the member States were asked to quickly re-establish the convertibility of their respective money at a fixed rate, after a transition period. This was to be crowned with a series of negotiations meant to liberalise commercial relationships. As testified by the dramatic experience of the British pound – soon to be the object of an American speculative attack aimed at destroying the velleity of independence of a sovereign City now reigning over its restored Commonwealth -, the transition  was not without its labor pains.

However, the immediate advantages were soon obvious: Through calculated generosity Washington had potently contributed to the reconstruction of a war-devastated Europe; it could now easily sustain the world-wide expansion of its multinational firms and, at the same time, practice an inebriated benign neglect for its chronic balance of payment deficit and launch with even more blindness into the Vietnam war. To finance all these imperial projections, it sufficed to print money.

The perversity of the mechanism did not escape General de Gaulle. Despite the warning against « inimical actions » by Washington, the General preventively chose to monthly convert the dollars cumulated by the French Central Bank into gold at Fort Knox, instead of contributing indirectly to support unjustifiable American policies abroad. The hazardous results of the Gaullist policy does not concern us here; what we want to stress in its nakedness is the pernicious monetary mechanism at play. Carabosse was indeed playing her part.

A rude awakening awaited all the members of the audience who in their patient optimism were still waiting for the final kiss, that sign of redemption of consciousness. On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon made it clear that fairytales and nice endings were now out of fashion in Washington. The vanguardist new neoliberal art was eventually brought to its apogee by MM. Volcker and Reagan.

To be true, Nixon was now faced with a trade deficit in addition to the chronic payment imbalance. Politically speaking he had to accommodate contradictory demands from the body politics. On one side that of the poorly competitive national bourgeoisie; on the other that of the multinational bourgeoisie, which globally disposed of assets abroad making it the Third (3) world economy, after the USA and the USSR! From this stemmed the unstable mixture of protectionism and Trilateralism that characterized Nixonian policies. This equally insured that nothing would be resolved. At most, adequate profits were guaranteed for the short term to both fractions of the American bourgeoise. The strategy was not more farseeing than this.

Thus the appearances of the Bretton Woods system were dispelled. As every Canadian remembers, Nixon was prone to declare the independence of other nations to better abolish « preferential » treatment so as to to free the USA form any binding duties. The next episodes will see the forceful efforts aimed at reinforcing the transfer mechanisms for the sole benefit of the United-States.  The amounts were considerable (see for instance Le Devoir, February 21, 1985). After all, if the transfer mechanism had worked to finance a disastrous imperialist war, with the avanguardist dexterity of a Volcker it could very well serve to finance the restructuration of an American industry now badly battered  by foreign competition.  This time around the international obligations attached to the privileges of the « leading currency » had to take second place. Needless to say, the Ethics of capitalism can only be utilitarian!

In a sense, Volcker was barely drawing the conclusions of a system that had unfolded in a paradoxical fashion since its beginning, to finally start its march toward the land of absurdity from 1971 onwards. Volcker and Reagan can very well nurture the illusion to serve the best interests of their class, and in some measure of their nation, with the condescending proviso that the health of the world rests on that of the United States of America however, in the end, it is all but an illusion. In this vaguely generous version, the desired goals they determined for themselves cannot and will not be reached. This is because the system has developed an intrinsic speculative logic, which no Monetarist manipulation, notwithstanding any pretences to financial wisdom, can control and canalise toward the productive investments which alone can trigger an economic growth that would be more than a « growth within recession ». At most, this will contribute to :

a)     The increase of the American debt proportionally to the high-rates of governmental borrowing, a debt which will eventually have to be reimbursed, and a simultaneous dramatic increase of unjustifiable and senseless military spending.

b)    The provisional mending of an international monetary system on the brink of debacle, a system which was far from offering golden eggs but which nonetheless acted as a good milking cow for the US. With his Monetarist manipulations, it seems that Mr. Volcker imprudently stepped on the Pandora Box. Not being the Epimetheus of the New Economic World Order conceived at Chicago, it must be feared that he will be condemned to a arduous Sisyphus’s labor.

The Bretton Woods system had thought to substitute the brutal automaticism of the Gold Standard with a conscious monetary management resting on the interdependence of the Nations-States. Now the evidence was telling a different story: The role and place of Central Banks had mutated under the pressure jointly exercised by the development of uncontrolled liquidities as well as that of the Euro-petrodollar markets and that of the spreading of electronic money.

Today the multinational firms control the greatest amount of liquidities, the global shifting of which frightens the Federal Reserve itself, especially when they are used to speculate against the US Dollar, as was the case for the first time on a big scale in 1977-1978. What is true for the FED is necessarily truer for all the other capitalist central banks.

One will recall that at the time Gold had reached the record level of US $ 840.00: The Federal Reserve keep this strong card, given the enormous amount of gold assets still at its disposal. However, this is far from being a master card since both South Africa and the USSR remain the main gold producers of the world. The new cold war has its logic, after all … Moreover, a stabilization solely based on the pronounced and lasting rise of the gold price world-wide would surely reintroduce in world trade all the rigidities which multilateralism has attempted to erase. This would be done without in the least bettering the payment balance or slowing down the slow but inevitable decline of the United-States of America.

The best alternative would have been to acknowledge this relative decline while concretely reinforcing the real share of responsibility exercised by other nations within the agencies belonging to the Bretton Woods System. Perhaps Carter and his Trilateralists would have been more inclined to co-opt the other protagonists. The election of Reagan to the White House did put an end to this illusory harmonious super-imperialism.

Behind the new President followed the « Committee on the Present Danger » (CPD). This organization soon substituted to the Trilateralists’s world view that of the old warmongering « containment » and « roll-back », namely the cold-war internationalism newly re-baked according to the stale recipe of the Council of Security Resolution No 68, written by P. Nitze. Not surprising he too belonged to the CPD! It was then clear that Washington could not resolve itself to go through the necessary catharsis called for by the acknowledgment of the very relative decline of the country, although the post-Vietnam context could have made it possible and salutary. On the contrary, with the pretext of the Iranian and Afghan crises, the USA chose to maintain their grip, thus accommodating themselves, albeit too easily, with Volcker/Reagan’s policies, and the implied forceful interventionism that accompanied them. In so doing a populist national consensus was forged, one which the great commercial banks soon dominated. It lasted during the entire fist presidential term. One had to wait for the end of February 1985, with its new speculative fever, to witness the national and multinational fractions of the American bourgeoisie pawing the ground with impatience against this domination now too exclusive for their taste.

Like Janus, this interventionism assumes more faces. We will let aside here Grenada and South America, although in both cases international law continues to be shamelessly trampled upon. On the domestic scene, with the pretext to backup deregulation and the unfettering of the market, it induced the recession. The old Keynesian prescription according to which one could resort to fiscal deficit to counter a recession was « bastardized »: From now on, fiscal deficits would be maintained simultaneously with the « growth within recession » albeit, this time around, the goal was not to reignite social demand and consumption. Instead, social demand was happily sacrificed as an inflation-inducing phenomenon, whereas very hypothetical private investments were supported through the reduction of taxation levels for the wealthiest fraction of the population. It came to pass that, after the unearthing of a pernicious pseudo-biology, we are now witnessing the official revival of a new anthropometric  … fiscal discipline as discriminatory as the original biological version.  For the rest, the accepted deficits did only stimulate a armament surplus.

On the external scene, with the dramatic rise of interest rates in New-York, this strategy ruins the countries belonging to the Periphery while teaching all those which fancied to be part of the Center or at least of Semi-Periphery what the word « leader » now really meant. As is well known, the Master has his reasons and they do not always stem from the heart.

A Monetarism conceived on such terms can only be a « bastardization » of the Bretton Woods system. According to Keynes, currency cannot be conceived as an end in itself, indeed, it represents the mean through which a more Just society could be achieved. Was his a moralizing vision? Perhaps! But at least, it derived from a truthful reformist thought, one that remains the sole guarantor of an hegemony that could pretend to some degree of legitimacy.

A more radical critique would object – with all my sympathy – that Keynesian monetary management unduly favors the realm of circulation over that of social production and consumption where the contradictions could really be resolved instead of being simply managed. However, in the past, the well-intentioned Reformists had been able to add Beveridge and, in a smaller measure, Kaleki to Keynes. Today, they are helplessly erring because the drive for profit muzzles their imagination. Not surprisingly, a cold and freezing wind, coming straight from Chicago, is making the road slippery under their feet. Nonetheless, the present predicament calls for the marshalling of all the well-intentioned imaginations: No one is exempt from the duty to think with one’s own head.

GENERAL REFERENCES:

 

Cheryl Payer, The debt trap

F. L. Block, The origin of international economic disorders

M. Hudson,

R.O. Keohane & J.S. Nye, Power and interdependence

D.M. Blake & R.S. Walters, The politics of global economic relations

R. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy

S. Strange, Sterling and the British Policy

J. W. Sanders, Peddlers of crisis: the Committee on Present Danger

and The Politics of Containment, South End Press, 1983.

 

XXX

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (III)

FILLING THE RANKS OF THE UNEMPLOYED. 

In the preceding sections we painted with wide strokes the contours of Volcker/Reagan’s « strategy » together with the context that gave birth to it. We also asserted that its objectives could not be met. We now have to demonstrate this in more details. The principal goal of this strategy is to block the tendential relative decline of the USA thanks to the instrumentalization of what is left of the Bretton Woods System. This requires the restructuring of the economy so as to reignite economic growth. However, we are talking here about military-industrial not socio-economic growth, which means that any growth will come at the detriment of a national debt already propelled by its ascending spiral.

We would then be confronted with a tragic blindness motivated by the defence of strictly private interests. The resulting accommodation will go along nurturing an already deleterious context with a characteristic resolve to resort to « coercitive » pedagogy or even to brute force. The fact of the matter is that the slowing down of the American industry, which is far from affecting the high-tech sectors, cannot be decreed by fiat nor by the manipulation of interest rates. The pseudo-knowledgeable manipulation of risk and irrationality, so dear to some known if doubtful nuclear deterrence theories, have no place whatsoever – pace Friedman – within the theory and practice of economic science, notwithstanding what « Reaganomics » likes to pretend.

Despite it achieving the status of a fad of late, Monetarism explains nothing and least of all what it pretends to solve. Like any other vacuous ideology, it draws its persuasive strength from the simplicity, if not the dull simpleness, of its politico-economic prescriptions. Without worrying about logical contradictions, an accusing finger points to the evil – inflation – and to the causes of that evil – the unions and the public deficit. Ghosts from the past are unearthed and the old game is played all over again: Remember Acheson treating MacCarthysts as « animals » just because they were unable to adjust to the new phraseology of « Detente » forgetting in the process that he had indeed been « present at (their ) creation »? And so, banking on this lasting ideological propensity, the sacrificial lambs are designated and the whole chorus soon cries with the wolfs … Long live the free market and its open society finally delivered from  their « enemies » …

Needless to say, things become quickly suspicious when the government itself leads the carnivorous hounds to partake in the sharing of the holocaust. One can safely bet that Mr. Volcker, a high ranking public servant devoted to the State and the interests it serves, does not harbor much illusions. But this game grants him a wide room for manoeuvres with which to implement a new although occult type of State interventionism. This constitutes a precious advantage when one already knows what precise objectives s/he wishes to reach.

We are told that inflation comes from the fact that there is too much money in circulation … that is to say in the wrong hands. Indeed, for the Monetarists, the problem is not to ascertain the origin of the discrepancy between the nominal monetary mass – money – and the real monetary mass – exchange value – in circulation. For them, labor power is a production factor similar to all others – capital, technology etc . Like all other factors of production, it receives its just remuneration through the magic mechanism of the free market and its « invisible hand ». What seriously grips this mechanism is the sole presence of rigidities in the labor and capital markets.

Within the first the culprits are the unions and their excessive wage demands accused of causing inflationary prices. Within the second the designated culprit is the government always prone to resort to loan-financed deficits – borrowing through the issuance of Treasury bonds etc – in order to balance spending far in excess of fiscal revenues. In so doing national saving would be soaked out, and it would no longer be available for private investments. Worse still, claim the Monetarist crews, government’s agencies are the least productive of all sectors: They do not hesitate in pointing to the salaried public servants, whom they portray as doing little, but who are blamed for the path-setting trend of their collective bargaining over the whole economy, including naturally the private sector. They point to all the facets of the supposedly unrestrained social spending, for instance social insurance and social assistance blamed as incentives to idleness; or education, an activity which does not directly answer the needs of industry and suspiciously feeds a taste for creativeness and critical thinking; or again they point to the Social Security system so badly abused … etc., etc … Death upon inflation, then! Once it be knocked down and slaughtered, the spirit of « entrepreneurship » will rise again and lead us to more propitious lands.

The remedy is straight forward. Given that wage-control is not enough, the government will have to take the unions to task; if consultations and other conciliations do not produce the desired amiable agreements, so be it, the government will resort to its « iron heel of repression » starting with public employees. This would undermine the inflationist spiral and the government deficit will start to shrink. The latter will further be diminished through spending cuts, particularly in the social safety nets.

To be sure, the discrepancy between governmental revenues and spending could be simply resolved through higher taxes or more simply by making taxation much less regressive than it actually is. Logically, nothing militates against the coupling of these measures or against the sole implementation of a more progressive fiscal policy. Compared to other countries, the USA still has lots of untapped fiscal resources. These remedies however are no longer to the taste of the Monetarists, a crew of generally well-paid people, therefore let us put the argument aside for now. Let us equally ignore for the time being the ratio of social to military spending.

It remains that while the government graciously frees up room for the private sector, the Federal Reserve manages the circulation of money accordingly. First, it reduces the available monetary mass. Naturally this will induce recession since the diminishing money supply will cause interest rates to rise – the indicators of the cost of money. As a result, the enterprises will be forced to reconsider their investment plans for the future and meanwhile they will quickly cut spending notably through lay-offs of their labor force. The filling of the non-employed ranks will thus start.

This is key, because it will directly blow out many rigidities on the labor market, particularly those that had survived the forceful Reaganite attacks upon unions. The private enterprise now cornering the savings freed by the minimalist State and disposing of an elastic labor supply could then initiate the much wanted and beneficial restructuration of the whole economy. The Federal Reserve will maintain its vigilance through the manipulation of interest rates with a stern eye on inflation, since if it were to raise from its ashes, all these beautiful plans would end up on a pyre. In this way profits will be secure and these profits will insure all the needed investments which in turn will create employment and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

This is an old tune!  Unfortunately, the Technicolor dream of the Monetarists soon translates into a nightmare for its victims. In the eyes of « economic science » it is but a vacuous dream and one which moreover suffers from acute stiffness in all its logical and psychological articulations. (It reminds us of James Joyce’s phrase: « History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake».)

First, by ignoring the distinction between nominal and real value, Monetarism treats inflation as a cause rather than an effect of a set of causes whose origins need to be discovered. It thus plunges us into a vicious circle since the various financial institutions, being individually confronted to a general inflation, are themselves forced to raise the monetary mass in circulation, if only by increasing its velocity. Indeed, the private financial institutions are mainly responsible for the money supply and its velocity, the Federal Reserve maintaining very restrained control powers; this is particularly true in an epoch characterized by a vulnerable financial credit structure, both domestically and internationally.

In these conditions the Federal Reserve tries to manage as best it can the monetary aggregate M1, which includes the circulating money, cheques and similar deposits including traveling cheques etc … As one might recall, during the week of February 25, 1985, this aggregate amounted to US $ 572.7 billion displaying an increase of 3.6 billion with respect to the preceding week (1) However, when the long term trend is taken into account, it becomes obvious that the growth of M1 is weak: It went from $ 414.1 billion in 1980 to $ 521.1 billion in 1983.

In order to have a better idea over the place and role of private financial institutions and the velocity of money, one needs to compare M1 to M3 (M3 being the aggregate M1 plus saving, intrabanks deposits, part of the Eurodollars held by American residents etc … It quickly becomes obvious that M3 grows much more quickly: in 1960, M1 was amounting to 45.1% of M3, whereas the percentage was 21,4 % in 1980 and 20 % in 1983. (2) (Added note January 2017: Today in the era of hegemonic speculative finance or what I called « Credit without collateral », the FED, now totally subservient to primary private so-called « universal » banks, does not even bother calculating M3 any longer … see the Section International Political Economy in www.la-commune-paraclet.com )

It is becoming clear that far from dictating to them the Federal Reserve really serves the best interests of the private financial institutions. A strict control of  M3 would endanger them at a time when big private banks like Continental Illinois need the helping hand of the government to survive.

Conversely, the strict control of the monetary aggregate M1 targets two objectives: First, the fight against inflation thanks to the drastic control of the amount of money available in the hands of individuals. Second, the manipulation of the small savings of the ordinary citizen. While the first action reaches its goal in the most discriminatory fashion – « demand pulled inflation » leaving way to « cost pushed inflation », the latter being considered more reasonable -, the second is but a waste of time simply because small savers can hardly depart from their funds since they fear the possible loss of their employment.

With its emphasis on entrepreneurship spirit, Monetarism is really invoking a lost « paradise »: That of the corner shopkeepers and butchers and that of the brave entrepreneurs operating within the family firms, all playing the classic competition game among themselves. The obvious concentration and centralization of capital have no part in their analysis. It is true that small and medium enterprises are the current new fad. Still it should not be forgotten that the great majority of them survive thanks to out-sourcing (for instance the thousand small businesses involved in the building of the F 18 in the USA, excluding Canada.) Even the small and medium businesses, which are able to increase their size through their innovations and creativity, are in some ways or others subordinated to the giants in their industry, which are able to dictate the norms. We make abstraction here of the secular fusion tendency which has now regained vitality. Recently, Mr. Baldrige, the Trade Secretary, was militating for « the abolition of the Section 7 of the Antitrust law in order to afford American companies to fusion more easily to better compete with foreign firms, a Draconian measure coldly received by Congress » (3)

Monetarism, of course. Yet, the theory and practice do diverge.  The whole affair would be totally incomprehensible were one to ignore the hegemony of private financial institutions going hand in hand with the euthanasia of the buying power of the ordinary employee cum consumer.

Let us look at it from a different angle. The public debt it is said to soak the savings to the detriment of the private sector. This argument is easily confuted when one compares the government debt with that of the private enterprises: While the first went from US $ 543 billion in 1974 to 1,573 billion in 1984, the latter for the same years went from US $ 900 billion to US $ 2,589 billion! (4) Still, according to their own theory, how would the Monetarist crews now in control explain that the increase of the public debt went almost entirely to military spending? Indeed, during the first presidential mandate of Reagan (80-84) military spending increased close to 40 %  xxx (5)

As stated earlier, the primary reason beyond this strategy is the restructuration effort aimed at arresting the decline of the United-States of America. As we saw, the Monetarists want to reach this lofty goal thanks to the suppression of rigidities in the labor and capital markets. The Monetarist theory forgets that:

a)     The USA is the dominant open economy within the context of an open world economy. The actions of the FED cannot be understood in abstraction from the directives it imposes to the IMF and to the World Bank.

b)    The enterprises – both firms and financial institutions – no longer correspond to the legend of the small creative and rugged entrepreneurs, being now multinationalised and disposing of enormous cash flows, liquidities which they circulate world-wide with ease.

c)     The increase of interest rates in New-York does attract these vagrant capitals which nonetheless are not invested in productive activities.

d)    The new developments of technology – electronic money among others – actually worsen the phenomena caused by these uncontrolled capital movements.

Yet the avant-guardist practitioner Volcker does not ignore what the theory occults or refuses to see, although he ideologically plays the game and dishes the current propaganda out.

Let us then examine the real recipes of the chief practitioner and of his acolyte Reagan.

To start with, market rigidities on the labor market are forcefully dismantled; real wages are everywhere sloping down and are now sanctuarized in new collective bargaining in which the dominating tendency consists in substituting binding arbitrage to negotiations. The recalcitrant unions, such as the Air controllers are fired en bloc. The family debt thus goes from US $ 671 billion in 1974 to 1,832 billion in 1984. This decrease is verified when we note that the revenues of the poorest 20 % of the American population decreased slightly more than 8 % (from US $ 6,913 to US $ 6,391 on average per person.) Meanwhile, the official rate of unemployment was slightly over 7 %. This happens in a deleterious context in which a series of reports, among them the OECD’s, with much presumed expertise, do their best in getting us used to the idea that the notion of full-employment really means a rate of unemployment oscillating between 7 % and 9 % at best, which clearly demonstrates that the dominant economic – dismal – science has developed a propensity for euphemisms. We hasten to add that aside from black market jobs, notoriously difficult to account for, the number of robots already substituting to American labor has gone from 6 000 in 1982 to some 13 000 in 1984, a tendency clearly destined to accelerate. It suffices to add the obvious cuts in social spending, sanguinely devised to « break up institutionalised idleness ». (7) As can be seen the first foundation of the Monetarist restructuration is safely in place!

The other foundation: To ignite industrial growth thanks to increased private investments aimed, as we saw earlier, at blocking the decline of the nation through an internal and external forceful restructuration. The task is here more delicate. Let us first look at the internal restructuration. (8)

By raising interest rates in New-York it is hoped that the attracted capitals will contribute to this wild economic restructuration of the country.

Indeed the inflows were enormous: For the sole year 1984, Leonard Silk of the New York Times mentions a total of 66.8 billion (see also the Le Monde diplomatique, February 1985). The same year, the banks alone had apparently managed to repatriate some 33.8 billion. (9)

Although this grants some breathing room to the banks most exposed internationally, this capital inflow is not invested into production activities in any creative fashion nor even as a priority. In effect, an effort is made to reverse the desindustrializing trend only in few still profitable sectors such as automobile, while financing fusions to make those enterprises more competitive on the world market. Of course, this is a shortcut which affords capitals lucrative investment opportunities without having to face the risk involved in the creation of entirely new enterprises.

At the same time, many industries considered « soft » such as textile, steel, footwear etc … which would have had to modernize their production processes are shunned upon as poor members of the family and simply sacrificed. This despite the fact that they do not have the wherewithal to finance it themselves given their lower profit margins. Conversely, big corporations such as IBM would be better placed to benefit from the capital inflows but are already capable to self-finance their own investments.

The Reaganian Administration did certainly innovate in the new fiscal anthropometric field by reducing taxes on enterprises and on the most privileged individuals. Nonetheless, private investment is not at the hoped for level. It seems that the wealthiest top two deciles of the American population saw its revenues increase 9 % from US $ 37 618 to US $ 40 688 from 1982 to 1984 (10), while those at the lower two deciles decreased 8 %. Obviously, the former quickly found its Royal road to (serfdom to) riches, namely speculation.

This overall system feeds the growth of the public debt much more than it contributes to a well-rounded economic restructuration. It so happens that whereas the Reaganian regime could claim a rate of industrial growth of 7 % in 1984, that is during an electoral year, in 1985 it must now cope with a bare 4 %. Similarly, it must cope with the fact that employment in the manufacturing sector decreased 6 % since 1979 while the newly created jobs, often badly paid and precarious, materialise in the lower-end service sector, such as restoration. (11)

A legitimate question to ask is then : Where do the vagabond roaming capitals go? An infinitesimal, though very gallant albeit calculating, part went East to court the small yet febrile enterprises of the Silicon Valley in California with their potential patents. Obviously, this choice comes with its share of joy and pain. The more prosaic troupers are only attracted to the inflated rates of the Treasury bonds – with a net increase of US $ 12.3 billion in 1984 (12) – as well as to other more secure bonds, especially those issued by the various government levels. So here you have it, the rebellious kid, the neoliberal State, now transforms itself into a nourishing breast for vagabond capitals. Of course, maternal milk has its virtues and the odd couple Volcker/Reagan knows how to nurture their own. At first, it looks like a touching tableau.

However, nurturing is not an easy task. At time it can become ungrateful: The American public debt, which already amounts to seven times that of the Third World (13) despite Mr. De Larosière’s surveillance, continues its upward trend and productive investments do not materialise. What else can the State do, if it has ideologically excluded to become a visible hand in its haste to favor a more crafty State interventionism which cannot utter its real name? It then remorsefully and shamefully increases military spending despite the fact that no shadow of a strategic necessity can be adduced for it.

In this way one hopes to kill two birds with one stone: First, by dragging the USSR in an unbridled arms race, its already gripped central planning can be lastingly disorganised and Soviet growth will be impaired. The USSR is thus invited to partake equally into the Western economic crisis. Second, military spending is used to legitimate an artfully created new cold war, thus allowing the direct transfer of funds from the « non-interventionist » neoliberal State to the very enterprises forming what President Eisenhower had rightly dubbed « the military-industrial complex », some of which being unable to survive without these lucrative procurements.

The other beneficiaries of course are the new tech enterprises whose profitability is thus insured and which are thus provided the money necessary to carry out their pure and applied research programs. The hope is that these will in turn stimulate all the other enterprises, including outsourcing, engaged in the sublime task consisting in delivering the most sophisticated material deemed necessary to the protection of the so-called Free-World. This might be the surest way to free it from its existential anguish: The definition of an accident is that it happens; and now it can happen in less than 6 to 8 minutes and we are promised even shorter laps of time with entirely automated systems that exclude any human control!

Economically speaking, the essential lesson to keep in mind from the preceding analysis is the complete and definitive kidnapping of the economic growth model. It no longer will be based on intermediary sectors producing consumers goods and thus capable to pull the rest of the economy, but it will be based instead on a closed system restricted to the military-industrial sectors, one which will attempt to perpetuate itself by diverting internal savings and increasingly now the available external « surpluses ».

Monetarism, indeed!  Its logic is as simple as its practice is infernal, worthy of an demented Alighieri. Inflated public debt, forceful elimination of certain industries going hand in hand with the concentration/centralisation of capital, namely the survival of the « fittest », restructuration/destruction of employment, arms race, engineered and sustained recession, deep cuts in social spending etc., etc. … but above all, the filling of the ranks of the unemployed … That is, until the day of reckoning.

REFERENCES:

1)    K. Gilpin, N.Y.T., March 8, 85

1)2) v. “the editors”, Monthly Review, Dec. 84, p.10

1)3) K.T. Kilborn, N.Y.T., March 3, 85

1)4) Le Monde Diplomatique, fév. 85

1)5) idem

1)6) idem

1)7) The fact that none among these epigons would trade theirs against it pertains to the domain of apodictic truth!

1)8) The dollar being a reserve currency, this distinction is almost nonsensical. However, we will show later how and with what dramatic consequences the socio-economic restructuration was imposed on other countries, particularly those of the Third World.

9) Leonard Silk, N.Y.T., March 1, 85

10) v. note No 7

11) P.T. Kilborn, op. cité

12) Leonard Silk, op. cit9

13) Le Monde Diplomatique, fév.85

 

XXX

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (IV)

PLAYING THE WRONG TUNE 

In practical terms the Monetarist road does not look at all like the Royal road proclaimed by its theory. Counting on anthropometric fiscal policies and on military spending to ensure economic growth will only cause a skyrocketing public debt … which, at some point, will have to be fought head on and not through skirmishes as is the case today. Even Washington cannot afford the luxury to sacrifice all just to bailout commercial banks and to forcefully restructure the industrial base.

Fatally the day of reckoning shows up on the horizon.

Whatever is said to the contrary, the decrease of the public debt through export gains is to be excluded, even if, as now done by the Reagan Administration, one accepts a industrial slowdown and attempts to lower slightly the interest rates and thus the value of the US dollar. The trade deficit in 1984 reached US $ 123,3 billion, the projection being at least around US $ 140 billion in 1985. (1)

As a matter of fact, the most productive enterprises have become multinational. They export little, preferring to delocalise their production off-shore. Moreover, the countries which are most likely to import American goods are themselves more indebted than ever. Many are unable to pay for their essential imports, except by recourse to short-term loans from the IMF. Of course, in exchange, the IMF graciously imposes its conditionality and refuses to increase its Special Drawing Rights. Worse still, the lowering of the dollar value and the contraction of the American market initiated in February, cancelled for all intents and purposes their own export gains. What remains are the export of agricultural goods and new products with a high technological content – eg. electronics and communication. The biggest buyers but also the biggest competition for these products come from the other OECD countries as well as from the newly industrialized nations around the Pacific Rim, which were targeted for American trade as early as 1977.

In this perspective it is useful to recall that the USA imported 8 % of its machine tools in 1970, this percentage passing to 20 % in 1983 and 24 % in 1984. (2)

There isn’t a shadow of a solution to this dilemma, unless one vainly chooses to keep on going on while passing the buck to the other OECD countries. Consequently, we would be condemned to dance the usual Monetarist polka at the beat of Volckerian interest rates: Since the end of February, crossing one’s fingers in an auspicious mode, an attempt was made in this direction auguring for a more peaceful weather. Then, gold will again flirt with levels judged as intolerable (between US $ 500-600?) which will reignite the firestorm and once again Volcker will look for peace – or vertigo – by attempting to reach the eye of the storm. Troubled times lie ahead, and nothing leads us to believe that Mr. Volcker will abjure his Monetarist policies, no more than Reagan will abandon his « star wars » lunacies to second rate actors and film-makers.  In these conditions, how can the war on debt unfold?

End of February, beginning of March: Unexpectedly a string of false notes tore the serene post-electoral blue sky apart. A brutal adjustment was needed but a synchronised, one well in tune with the master of ceremony Volcker’s own ways. Let us try to reveal the structure by following the anecdotic unfolding of events.

On February 20, 1985, Mrs Thatcher, the great fan of President Reagan, took upon herself to remind him politely that the strongly ascending American dollar, with its induced pressures on European economies, could lead to protectionism. (3) Was the Iron Lady suddenly turning into a Cassandra or into a potential Dr. Schacht? Well, at most an Hermes in the Monetarist Olympia. Soon, on February 25, Mr. Volcker mentioned the debt problem but sotto voce; on February 26, the CND dollar momentarily stopped its fall. Wednesday February 27,  the key day in this episode, the central banks of all the OECD countries intervened massively and simultaneously to prop-up their respective money, while the Federal Reserve lent an helping hand moderating its own activities. They spent close to 2 billion in one day. That very same day, the Bundesbank alone spent half a billion through its intervention in the Middle-East markets as well as in Frankfort. (4) That same day, Mr. Volcker informed Congress that the intervention of the Central Banks was too modest to influence durably the quotations of currencies. Mr. Royer Kubarysh, from the American Conference Board, who up until January had been the Chief Economist of the FED, clarified that since US $ 50 to 100 billion are exchanged daily on the world bourses, in order to be efficient the intervention had to be around US $ 10 billion instead of US $ 2 billion. (2) Who would doubt Mr.Volcker’s Delphic voice? On Thursday February 28, the CND dollar lost 0.54 cent; on Friday March 1^st, it still abandoned 0.19 cent to close at 71,89. Luckily the Bourse closes during the week-end. Yet, this episode reveals in unambiguous terms the tragic structural weakness of Central banks when confronted to the American Federal Reserve, an unforeseen consequence of the Bretton Woods System.

But Mr. Volcker has more than one arrow in his quiver: On this very same February 27, he announced the progressive slowdown of the ascending trend of the M1 monetary aggregate. And he hasten to add prudently that no definitive decision was yet made. The markets are understandably worried, the value of the Treasury bonds is affected. The following week Mr. Volcker pursue his mission to shape the psychology of the markets. He kids them for their incomprehension and paternally adds : « We want to procure enough money this year to support the disciplined growth of demand and output». (6) And thus, when the markets finally learn that the monetary mass M1 has increased by 3,6 billion – namely less than had been expected – that increase proved sufficient to maintain the markets’ trust. (7) Mr. Volcker know his crowds well: The feverish rise of the US dollar was blocked and the other currencies gained some breathing room to engineer a soft reversal of the trend.

Although is it barely perceptible there is an interesting phenomenon to keep under watch: Gold is again on an ascending trend in the various financial centers but in a more disparate way. Does this signal more autonomy for the various central banks? When will we finally have an effective control over M3?

Be it as it may, after having set the stage, Mr. Volker is now able to « go against » its main nemesis. On March 4, he admitted that the American deficit must be  reduced but without resorting to tax increases. A true dilemma since now the Chairman is exiting his own domain to enter one less accustomed to dexterity: Namely that of the relationships between the President, the House of Representatives and the Senate or, more generically speaking, that of politicking politics. For instance, although Mr. Volcker has his own logic, nonetheless the « vice-chairman » of the Federal Reserve, Preston Martin, who owes his nomination to Mr. Reagan, did not hesitate to oppose his Chief when he declared that the monetary aggregate M1 had to rise faster this year.

Nonetheless, Mr. Volker has his own backings. First, in the person of James Baker III, the new Treasury Secretary: Through him the Reagan Administration recognized that there was a link between the overvalued US dollar and the American deficit. Adding to this, the multinational firms are loudly recriminating. According to them, commercial banks should no longer get priority since their debt had been restructured « successfully » for a decade. Above all, farmers, the producers of textiles, steel and all the other traditional producers, all vulnerable to foreign imports or necessitating a lower dollar or even – contrary to neoliberal propaganda – direct subventions, are starting to mobilise. To top it all, Mr. de Larosière adds his voice to the chorus now ready to transform into a general mess if some remedy were not quickly found.

At beginning of March the realignment of the forces in presence started to take shape: Reagan vetoed a legislative action aimed at creating an emergency fund for farmers. The Reaganian reasons? It would add to the deficit! The Senate Budget Committee did not appreciate and replied with a cut of US $ 79 billion in military spending for the next three years. Check! After some dodging tactics Mr. Reagan was able in the end of March to pass through Congress a new tranche for the building of the useless MX missile: A good point for the warmongering crews, a bad one for the deficit warriors.

But still no check-mate since everyone is now on board for deficit reduction except on the ways and means to achieve it …

It be a true Gordian knot even without the political and military complications. Mr. Leonard Silk sums it all up in the following manner: « Under the lead of Mr. Volcker, the Federal Reserve seems engaged in a Monetarist strategy aimed at gradually reducing the rate of change of the dollar thus inflicting heavy damages to the competitiveness of importing and exporting American firms and agriculture, increasing at the same time the protectionist pressures that can threaten world trade. Since a lower dollar induces a rising inflation and higher interest rates, the Federal Reserve is confronted to a difficult problem in its conduct of its monetary policy. If it restricts the monetary mass to counter the inflation caused by a lower dollar, rising interest rates would result. The danger being that higher interest rates will undercut economic growth in the US, thus intensifying the problems the Third World countries face in reimbursing their own debt and plunging the world economy back into recession» (10)

This precisely why Mr. Volcker, who likes to play many keys simultaneously, chose to swim with the flow: To avoid « recession », he encourages the reduction of the deficit without tax increases. And because Mr. Reagan is quite sanguine about his star-spangled warring lunacies, given the lack of alternative, he prepares to pass the buck along.

The most optimistic scenario realises that the US dollar has appreciated 9 % since December 1984: The game consisting in slowly cancelling this increase with the hope that an economic rebound in the other OECD countries and in some Pacific Rim countries will be able to attract wandering capitals and to absorb more American exports, at least for a while. In such a fashion, both recession and speculation would be more or less restrained. With this in mind the FED Chairman would then be ready to keep American growth around 4 % – it reached 7 % last year – while attempting to reduce the public deficit by US $ 50 billion so as to set the stage for a more viable solution in the longer run. Ingenious or foolish hopes?

The question is: Whence would the spending cuts come from? As long a Reagan – back to childhood with age ? – fancies himself as playing his part in a star-spangled western, the only likely cuts will come from social safety nets although they are already badly bleeding. The prospective amounts will be small. Meanwhile the White House and Congress will continue their horse-trading over the budget. Only skirmishes against the national debt can  be expected. Are we reduced to patiently wait for some light coming with the next elections? Can we afford to wait until then?

People in power are prone to pretend that their social and political choices are imposed by objective necessity: Their detractors are wrong by definition. Yet, there is nothing necessary or objective at all in anthropomorphic fiscal policy, nor in the diagnosis used to prescribe it. The only perceivable necessity comes from the defence of particular interests to the detriment of others.  The true necessity today consists in thinking alternative choices that would be less onerous to society taken as a whole.

The real problem is not so much the relative loss of global competitiveness of the United-States of America than in its excessive increase in the new high tech sectors. This rising productivity, which by definition destroys employment – « freeing » the labor force – has exploded the « Welfare State » systemic logic that had been put in place with the New Deal. It was based on three main inter-related axis:

1) The counter-weighting of the new power accumulated by the giants Big Corporations by bona fide union organizations sufficiently strong to participate in the institutionalised collective bargaining process, instead of being reduced to a yellow simulacra; to this were added the social security and educational apparatuses (schools, university, research centers, etc.);

2) the more or less complete abandonment of the theory of annually balanced budgets, which wrongly reduced the State to the rank of an individual subordinated to Victorian puritan principles; instead it was now recognised that a more audacious use of monetary and fiscal levers could play a role in countering trades cycles;

3) domestic growth could be sustained within the framework of a negotiated multilateral order (IMF, BIRD, GATT, UNTACD etc …)

What distinguishes the current crisis from that of the Thirties, is that it derives from different causes. The Great Depression was aptly described as a maturation/stagnation crisis (Hansen, Kalecki, Steidl, Sweezy etc …) in the sense that the major technological advances were established, so that the problem of production being resolved, it was sufficient to resolve that caused by social consumption, even at the cost of revising some die-hard prejudices.

For what concerns growth, although the Cold War substantially diverted its course toward the development of the military-industrial complex, it could essentially be insure by the pulling effect owed to the rapid development of intermediary – then labor-intensive – sectors such as the massification of the automobile, domestic utilities, construction etc …. This tapped into the release of the forced saving effectuated during wartime – Victory bonds – flanked by more decent salary increases now obtained through collective bargaining.

Conversely, the current crisis lays on the fact that the technological innovations constantly introduced at the production level do not find a counterpart in the development of social consumptions, simply because governments have now chosen to divert the model toward a system foreclosed by military spending – which, s everyone knows, displays much lower economic multiplicator effects.

True, the classic intermediary sectors have not disappeared, but their pulling place and role in the economy are considerably diminished. This process started in the end of the Sixties, when the massive introduction of new technologies started. See, for instance, the accompanying decrease in real wages as well as the unions attempts to negotiate a decent protection of purchasing power with the Cola clause.  The process underwent a strong acceleration afterwards and continues unabated today.

The real challenge would then lay in the necessity to develop new intermediary sectors that are capable to sustain social growth.  Otherwise, the system will survive only at the cost of developing harsher means to control the population, be it admitted or not. Such a regime would thus signal the necessity of its overthrow.

The seeds of these new sectors already exist in the high tech industries – computers, biotechnologies etc … If these sectors were socialized or at least sufficiently socially-oriented, it would then appear that, instead of placing unions, civil society pressure groups, universities and research centers under attack, instead of resorting to an unilaterally-imposed and aggressive multilateralism, it could  be far more profitable to renegotiate the latter and develop the former. In the first instance the Learned Institutions devoted to the advancement of science, within the framework of a shorter working day going hand in hand with pressing real and not second-class retraining needs, as well as with the newly affirmed role of knowledge as a Means of production. All of these have a crucial role to play. And here every one of us has a right and an obligation to participate; only then could the end of the present crisis be envisaged. Elementary and Secondary Schools can only suffice for those who still dream with F. Taylor of harnessing Humans as « trained gorilla ». Similarly, domestic work should be socialised for all of us, since it silently and gratuitously contributes the equivalent of a third – 1/3 – of GDP. Despite the evidence, it is just the opposite that is imposed on us today.

Making abstraction of prejudices, the main objection levied against this line of thought consists in saying that such a strategy would increase the cost of the labor force and thus abolish our productivity on the world market. On this note, the specter of the workers laboring for famish wages and without interfering unions in Third World and in newly industrialized countries is brandished in front of our eyes. The so-called objective necessity over again falling on us like misery on the shoulders of poor folks.

Unfortunately, this reasoning is not only partial it is plainly fallacious. It rests on an illegitimate or at least very shaky premise, that of the great Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory. We should keep in mind that the original example provided by Ricardo concerned the English wool manufacture and the wine produced in Portugal. We can easily judge the results of such terms of trade! The German economist F. List quickly realised that a nationally coherent strategy did not necessarily oppose the logic of comparative advantages proposed by Ricardo but would make certain to correct its perverse consequences.

The coherence of an economic reproduction system needs not be spread hazardously on a world-scale. One can and should choose to reinforce it domestically. As an illustration, let us recall that Quebec succeeded in gaining a sizeable share of export of manufactured Canadian goods because since the Quiet Revolution, various attempts were made to restructure the national economy. It is only sad to see that this development has now come under questioning and that people like Mr. Parizeau equally backs the privatization of successful public enterprises such ad Hydro-Québec. In the same vein, let us recall that the USA and the OECD countries have de facto raised their various barriers to oppose the free entry of manufactured goods.

Let us get this point straight, the international free competition discourse hides the reality of a forceful restructuring carried over on the world scale under the hegemony of the USA, under the guidance of the private interests of commercial banks and that of new high tech industries: Thus private and militarized growth substitutes for a larger and more beneficial social growth.

REFERENCES:

 

1) La tribune de l’économie, sam. 2, dim. 3 mars 1985

2) P.T. Kilborn, N.Y.T., March 3, 85

3) Le Devoir, 21 fév. 85

4) La tribune de l’économie, op. cité.

5) Cité par Kilborn, op. cité

6) Cité par Leonard Silk, N.Y.T. , March 2, 85

7) K.N. Gilpin, N.Y.T., March 8, 85

8) Le Monde Diplomatique, mars 85. Although Claude Julien seems to exaggerate the differences that supposedly distinguished the General Director of the IMF and the Chairman of the FED.

9) Leonard Silk, N.Y.T., March 8, 85

10) idem

11) Louise Vandelac (sous la direction de), Du travail et de

l’amour: les dessous de la production domestique, éd. Saint-Martin, 1985.

XXX

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MM. VOLCKER, REAGAN AND CO. (V)

DIVINA COMMEDIA: THE DEVILISH NEGATIVE GROWTH. 

Since 1945, the so-called developing countries mostly saw the development of their underdevelopment. The denunciation of this sad reality ceased to be limited to the radicals as soon as 1964, when Raul Prebisch succeeded with the help of peripheral countries in founding the UNCTAD of which he became the first General Secretary. Under his guidance, these countries organized into what will come to be known as the « Group of 77 ». They soon denounced the GATT agreements, which according to them was a mean by which developing countries were exploited through the imposition of unequal terms of exchange.  They soon learned to go beyond this problematic. In a way, the deaf North-South dialogue and the call for an New International Economic Order confirmed this diagnostic. Whether or not they were ever taken seriously by wealthy nations, these initiatives are unceremoniously pushed aside by the Monetarist crews now safely in power.

This counter-initiative of the wealthiest countries under the leadership of Washington unfolds at a time when the union of « Group of 77 », an organization always characterized by loose solidarity at best, was torn apart. The reasons behind this breakup must be searched within the new environment that engendered it:

A)  The impact of the Oil shock – 1973/1979 – over the non-oil producing countries of the Periphery;

B)   The emergence of oil-producing countries prompt to place their own national interest first and above all preoccupied with the recycling of their newly acquired wealth in the North.

C)   The emergence of what is perhaps too hastily called the « new industrialised countries » such as South Korea, Singapore, Taïwan, Brazil …

There remains that the weakened defensive cohesion of the Periphery is relegated to the museum of History at least for a while. Through its disparate voices it only testifies of the powerlessness of the nations involved. They are now obliged to beg for help piecemeal at a time when unity of purpose would have been a vital necessity. The policy acted by MM. Volcker/Reagan as well as that of the IMF and of the World Bank Group – IBIRD, International Financing Corporation, International Development Association – all practically controlled by Washington, quickly engaged in accentuating this fracture to better exploit it. In the American Capital City the priority is no longer on the engineering of development models (Rostow etc ) and other green revolutions, but instead on the reabsorbing of the debt of peripheral countries. South-American countries are especially targeted, because they otherwise could push American banks to the brink of bankruptcy, dragging the whole international financial system with them.

In August 1982, the alarm bell was ringed by Mexico. It could no longer honor a public debt amounting to US $ 81 billion. To pre-empt the bankruptcy of the country together with the chain of events it would unleash, the American banks under the aegis of the IMF bailed the Mexican government out, a manoeuvre which did cost around US $ 30 billion in the form of new loans. At the same time, under the control of the IMF, the prudently termed so-called « partnership with the private sector » was set up.

The countries of the Periphery had been asking for years for an increase of 50 % to 100 % of the US $ 67 billion IMF quotas.  The USA opposed the measure with the pretext that such an increase would lead these countries to neglect their debts – something which apparently is only allowed with impunity for the US government. The Reagan Administration proposed instead a 25 % increase of their own IMF quotas – that is to say more than US $ 8,4 billion. This would be added to the increase of the quotas of the remaining 146 member countries, bringing the total available to US $ 47 billion. (2) Moreover, the USA proposed the creation of an Emergency Fund of US $ 25 billion. Overseeing it all Mr. de Larosière in the name of the IMF promised to exercise his surveillance.

In parallel however the American Treasury advised a cut of 35 % to 45 % of the American contributions to the International Development Association. It is important to note that this Association represented the « soft loan window » of the World Bank Group. This despite the fact that a 1982 study from the Treasury Department itself had recognised that the profits flowing from World Bank projects were excellent at some 15-20%. Usually you recognize the beast from its fur: the 10 biggest borrowers from the World Bank are also the 10 biggest beneficiaries of US bilateral aid, such as India, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey etc …(3)

You cannot escape the conclusions: To ensure their strategic positions and their economic domination, the USA chose to heavily support some among the « newly industrialised countries » forcing those with a threatening debt to undergo brutal adjustment programs and, last but not least, to abandon the others to a diminishing international aid and to a Humanitarian aid which will save what it can in the context of austerity programs devised by oft surnumerary and overpaid experts from the IMF and the World Bank.

As a matter of fact, these latter countries with a debt ratio of 1/1 with their export gains are less threatening to Western banks than South-American nations which display a ratio of 3.5/1. Indirect investments and multinational firms are less present and feel less threatened in the short term. Also, their share of American import/export are weaker.

The great majority among these countries are from Africa. You might recall that President Mitterrand had declared that Africa risked becoming « a lost continent for development ». It be truer to say that Africa had become the designated place where to demonstrate the brutal development strategy under the tutelage of IMF conditionalities. Perhaps Mr. Mitterrand and his EEC colleagues might instead urgently re-visit the Accords signed by the Community and African States, as well as revise their own positions within international organizations.

In any case, at least for now, the USA and the IMF were able to impose their own priorities: The biggest public debts were restructured for close to a decade and the IMF conditionality has become the norm. Wealthy countries and their banks can breathe. And the New York Times could write : « This accord, to which is added the recovery of the indebted countries, leads us to think that although the problem will be with us for years, the worse is behind us. » And it wisely added « As far as the difficulties linked to this debt are concerned, it is unfortunately certain that the situation is different. » (4)

In these conditions the restructuring of the debt itself becomes a very lucrative business. The new loans are offered with rates 1-1/4 % higher than the minimum offered in the USA (5) although, in truth, no economic recovery is in sight.

As can be seen, with the exception of « newly industrialised countries », we are witnessing the development of a dramatic social catastrophe. As for these countries they remain very vulnerable because of high indebtedness and because their economies are highly sensible to the fluctuations of American imports given their productive choices. With the recourse to a barbarous euphemism, it was dubbed as « negative growth »; this is because, despite a decreasing GDP, export-linked gains destined to reimburse the debt, are rising.

Concretely what does this mean? Brazil for instance witnessed a rate of growth around 10 % during the 70s: The so-called « Brazilian miracle » albeit too hastily praised since the betterment of the standard of living of the general population was far for following this rhythm. During the same epoch, some believed that a « Mexican miracle » was likewise underway thanks to oil revenues. However : « in Mexico, growth was negative to the tune of 4.3 % in 1983 and nil in 1984. In Brazil, the negative growth averaged – 3.3% in 1983 and was very slightly positive in 1984 because it was pulled by the huge American deficit. » (6) In both cases, the choice was not so much to reimburse the debt but rather to show that it was still possible to do it in order to reassure the markets.

Of course, this is done to the detriment of the populations who endure the consequences of massive devaluations in their flesh because of more cuts in already savaged social spending, because of restrictions imposed on the importations of many products and last but not least because of the ferocious repressions when these governments were confronted with hunger revolts.

The gravity of the situation is soon understood. It suffices to recall that in South-America only two countries, Paraguay and Columbia, are more or less able to meet their financial obligations not to speak of humanitarian ones. The others, such as Bolivia and Argentina, are pushed to the brink of the abyss. Recently Bolivia made the Western Prime News because of a general strike of workers and peasants whose buying power is continuously eaten up by a rate of inflation of 3 400 %. On March 20, 1985, the army dispersed the barricades erected in La Paz and the Headquarters of the army informed the Bolivian President that he should leave within a year, thus signaling the possible end of the Civilian regime. (7) It was possibly worse for the young democratic government of Argentina, which was de facto severed from the IMF, forcing President Alfonsin to go to the White House on March 19, 1985, in order to plead his cause. He did so warning that failing a forthcoming aid to his country « the immediate consequence would be that the usual demagogues would attempt to use armed force to get what democracy could not provide. » (8) Reagan, always true to himself promised to lift the ban in exchange for a negotiated austerity plan, thus displaying his total indifference to the preoccupations of the Argentine people.  But Reagan is also the man who asks Congress US $ 14 billion more to finance the good deeds of the Nicaraguan contras.

And thus, production for export becomes the sole option. This means sacrificing any socially oriented endeavors. It equally signify more national dependency because the economic agents involved are the producers of raw materials and semi-finished products or else foreign multinational firms, which, of course, reveals the whole odious perversity of the austerity programs imposed. Worse still, if that was possible, the producers of armaments are greatly favored. (9)

Nonetheless we must note that multinational firms are less able to make good of the situation compared to private banks. They are now resorting to the development of « barter trade ». For instance, Volkswagen, which builds its famous « bugs » in Brazil, is now exporting them and does operate a ranch in this country – the beef is then sold in Germany – in order to insure its « cash flow ». The same company sells its cars in Mexico against payment in coffee which it then sells in Germany. (11)

This darkened reality takes new forms that are even more scandalous. Thus, in 1983 South-American countries paid US $ 40 billion in interest – at a rate of 14 % – for the financing of a debt amounting to US $ 350 billion. At the same time, annual revenues amounted to US $ 95 billion. These reimbursements being far in excess of the new loans granted during the same year, we are witnessing here a net export of capital. (12) This outflow does not account for the profits being repatriated by the multinational firms.  The whole affair becomes even more absurd when one adds the outflows of capital caused by the high American interest rates. This adds up, for instance, to US $ 35 billion for Venezuela alone. (13) We can easily trust Leonard Silk when he writes on the New York Times that American banks have repatriated more that US $ 33.8 billion in 1984, this number to be compared with US $ 45.1 billion in external loans granted in 1982. (14)

As can be seen the mechanism fits perfectly into the strategy devised by Volcker/Reagan and Co. As we saw, no illusions can be entertained as to its consequences. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan democracy is harassed by foreign trained and financed contras and that of Bolivia and Argentina, as well as that of many other people and countries the world over, are strangled with the Monetarist noose coldly applied world-wide.

Seen from the angle of the populations in the Periphery or from that of people whose sensibility is not yet entirely chloroformed, on the doors of the Federal Reserve, of the IMF and World Bank could be written the warning Dante imagined for the Doors of Hell : « Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate».

We only looked here at the main aspects of the Monetarist financial-economic world’s restructuration. It is thus with a sense of tragedy that we hear Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mme Vezina-Parent, lay out her policies. (15) Thus, at least until 1995, the foreign aid objective established at 0,7 % of GDP will be abandoned; in the name of budgetary restrictions this will be lowered to 0,5 %. Instead, what is proposed is a « partnership with the private sector » and the contribution to a new emergency funds controlled by the IMF of between US $ 20-25 billion! MM. Volker, Reagan and de Larosière can sleep on both ears: Their policy has been piously swallowed whole! Apparently the current Canadian government will not succumb to unbridled altruism; nor will it lead the way for creative proposals such as The Law of the Sea Conference which was ignominiously aborted by Reagan on his coming to power although it contained all the elements which could have created a more generous environment for the entire Planet. (In simple terms the Law of the Sea Conference affirmed that the revenues drawn from the exploitation of the potentially enormous resources lying at the bottom of the seas were to accrue the Humanity as a whole. Countries with coast lines were granted a 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone as a counterpart for its environmental protection. In this UN context, these resources could have led to a planetary economic boom involving all countries rich or poor.)

37 % of Canadian foreign aid will thus remain bilateral, 44 % will be multilateral and 19 % will consists of food help. Particular attention will be paid to the agricultural and energy sectors in order to support the export industries. For the rest, the generosity of the public is invoked – as a matter of fact it already does better than the government, which should perhaps take its cue from it notwithstanding the reference of the minister to Canadian unemployed, if only because everyone knows that the ACDI projects are not gratuitous. Similarly, we were not spared a reference to that trump card in the subject matter, namely the NGOs. Thus Mr. Desjardins (Marcel) says straight – and probably meaning it – that they do accomplish admirable works with very little means …

From our point of view, we believe that this is a short-sighted policy, one which accommodates itself too easily with the structure of our current insertion into the World Economy. But, as is clear to everyone, this structure is becoming unfavorable in the long and middle term since it penalizes our export of finished products even with respect to countries like South Korea with which we already have a trade deficit of  $ 478 million in 1984. (16)

The choices could be different:

a)     We could support a real increase of the IMF quotas together with less rigorous borrowing conditions. Since the IMF and Washington insist for a partnership with the private sector, why not look for ways and means to immobilise the vagabond capitals they created in the first place? It is easy to do: For instance, by letting private capital join in projects financed through governmental quotas with a minority stake. This would increase the amounts available and at the same time it would diminish the world financial volatility which is so detrimental to growth. Similarly, this would permit the establishment of the IMF’s SDR as the real international reserve currency. In effect, what is at stake is not so much the extent of foreign aid amounts but rather the tightness of the Bretton Woods twins.

b)    The funds now available to the World Bank Group in particular those available to the International Development Association should be increased and their development strategy should be independent from that dictated by the Federal Reserve and by bilateral American foreign aid. We should emphasise here that the World Bank recognised of late that its support for projects like the Green Revolution did not produce the expected results, having contributed instead to accelerate an already disastrous social differentiation in the countryside. (17) The emphasis is now on the development of village community. However, this can only be a progress if the necessary autonomy is granted to these communities and to the concerned governments without diminishing the « aid » they receive. Unfortunately, it seems that the World Bank harbors different ideas: In the context of the cutting off of the Fourth World, the its priority has become the bare insurance of subsistence production (which as a matter of fact are more efficient in the context of local communities than in that of so-called Green revolutions.)

c)     Some countries like Nicaragua, Tanzania etc are accomplishing sincere efforts in very difficult situations. We should support them. Joint-programs aimed at sharing our technology –  thus helping redress our trade imbalances – could very well be developed with these countries.

d)    The negotiations surrounding the New International Economic Order should be given a new chance. Without them the new forceful Monetarist world restructuration will continue unabated to the detriment of the less wealthy nations and this will be far from advantageous for us.

Those who self-proclaim themselves « realists » like to repeat that politics is the art of the possible. On the contrary, it could become a striving for the creations of new possible alternatives. It might be useful to recall the saying of a great American historian W. A. Williams. He wrote: « A world without utopia is like a sky without stars. It is fine until it gets dark.»

 

REFERENCES:

 

1) Sylvia Ann Hewlett& D.F. Burton Jr “The World Bank, the IMF and

US economic self-interest”, US Today, March 1983, in World Politics

84/85

 

2) Tom Wicker, op cité (N.Y.T., nov.4,83, in World Politics 84/85

It generally takes three years before the decisions to increase quotas are fully implemented. This became effective in 1984.

 

3) S.A. Hewlett & D.F. Burton, op cité.

 

4) Nicholas Kristof, in Le Devoir, 20 mars 1985

 

5) Idem

 

6) Philippie Norel, in Le Monde Diplomatique, mars 85

 

7) Le Devoir, 21 mars 85

 

8) Le Devoir, 20 mars 85

 

9) v. Le Monde Diplomatique, mars 85

 

10) On the reluctant attitude of the multinationales v. Claude Julien, in  Le

Monde Diplomatique, mars 85

 

11)Tom Wicker, op cité

 

12) Idem

 

13) Le Monde Diplomatique, mars 85

 

14) Leonard Silk “What goes up comes down” in N.Y.T., March 1,85

 

15) “L’aide publique au développement et le commerce international”,

Conférence, UQAM, 4 mars 85 ( invité-e-s: Mme Vezina-Parent,

ministre des relations extérieures du Canada; M Louis Sabourin

(ENAP); M J. Brodeur, directeur de l’association québécoise des

organismes de coopération internationale; M Marcel Desjardins

(CEGIR)

16) Le Devoir, 8 mars 85 ( Our commercial deficit with the entire Asian area amounted to $ 448 millions in 84 ; our exports to Asia and  Oceania are rising slightly : they went from $ 9.1 billion in 1983 to 10,4 billion in 1984.)

17) v. Francine R. Frankel “Compulsion and social change” in World politics, Jan 78. See also Henri Rouille , Coopérer autrement and Patricia Adams & Ron Sullivan, In the name of progress, Double day edition.

Montréal, March 1985.

Copyright © March 1985 (English translation : January, 2017.)

xxx

Are false flags to be feared and, if so, in what form will they come? (February 4^th, 2017)

On false flags you will want to check the link below. (1)

We have said that the current Reaganite-Monetarist cycle is coming to an end. The day of reckoning is nearing. But, of course, such ends always come with a final bang.

Economically speaking the rehabilitation of Jewish-fascist and others crackpots like von Mises, for instance the lunatic anomic crews from Chicago University, brought us this cycle. As everyone should know, the Austrian-Jew von Mises, adviser to his Fascist Chancellor, never changed his opinions even after he was forced to flee out of Austria because of the Anschluss.

Their Chicago Boys policies were soon to be enriched – so to speak – with new developments in their « dismal discipline ». For instance, the Behaviorist « economic school » led the the Israeli army officer Daniel Kahneman. Other followed, in great numbers and tribes as usual. These peoples do not care much about economic science because they pretend to subordinate it to their own brand of psychology. The do so with the help of new developments in likewise Behaviorist and bourgeois economic anthropology by colleagues as bright as they. It all goes back to the American behaviorist simplified vision of Man – stimulus-response – sometimes mitigated by the cultural milieu, but always assuming as a perennial nature the last form of the acquisitive mind set of the self-proclaimed elites. Not only are all social exchanges deemed to be always and everywhere capitalist exchanges, but they are thought to be so according to the last dominant form of capitalism. Potlatch can be explained as a form of speculation: The only thing needed to make your proof solid is to be shelter from outside critiques and limit your officially backed discourses to people and peer reviews selected on the same basis as you.

These days even Jean Tirole is a fan of these new « scientific » fads. With the expected consequences. But, then, he never made real use of his real mathematical training. Indeed, you do not need it in the « dismal discipline » because in order to belong and continue to be part of the select Club, you only need to accept some initial forged fallacies as true from the beginning. For example, that you can draw your supply curve by providing ex ante a table of prices for demand and conversely that you can determine the demand curve by providing ex ante a table of supply prices, after which the only thing needed to get the real market price is to happily cross both resulting curves and viola! you now have the magical market price. It comes with its shinning diagrams or equations, courtesy of the Marginalist forgers who act as the new Great Priests! This is so convincing to simple minds that, « of curse », you need to conclude that without the sovereignty of the market the economic field cannot be comprehended nor can it function properly.

This was the initial Marginalist falsification. Many others did follow : See on the subject my Methodological introduction and my Hi-Ha! The bourgeois economist’s donkish visual hallucinations. (August, 2009)

Here is what I wrote in my « J’accuse » on this same site:

« I insist on the fact that my criticisms of the dominant economic paradigm are fundamental. Until the opposite be proven, granting me my academic right to answer, I pretend that they are definitive. Censorship is not an acceptable form of scientific refutation; it only dishonors those who engage in it or are complicit with it, people who, for most, are directly or indirectly paid out of the public purse.

My criticisms go well beyond those levied by Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson during the so-called controversy opposing Cambridge UK and Cambridge USA during the 60’s and the 70’s. For one good and simple reason : Before me no one knew how to demonstrate the scientific theory of productivity, a scientific law which brooms aside all the pseudo-criticisms addressed to Marx’s Labor Law of Value, in particular those know as the « problem of the transformation of values into prices of production ».

My scientific contributions and consequently my criticisms – which I repeat are definitive until proven wrong scientifically – do not only concern my opponents in the Blog de Ugeux: I have challenged all the Jean Tirole and other Cahuc, now grotesquely and dangerously overrepresented in the discipline, to participate in the public debate in the blog of Ugeux or elsewhere. (This goes for American economists including so-called « Nobel » prizes). As far as I am concerned, this explain why they all actively militate for the suppression of plurality in the discipline: Such a plurality would quickly reveal their theories as hot air balloons.

This certainly explains why my electronic address was systematically blocked in the most hypocritical fashion by this Ugeux who thus displays his true face and nature. I recall that the « contrat unique » of Jean Tirole was translated in Italian and implemented with the Jobs Act, a labor legislation which quickly led to such a fiasco that the current government does not even dare to hold a referendum on the question despite the Constitutional court ruling on the matter.

As for the current speculative and economic crisis, it is useful to bring back to Tirole’s memory the book he wrote with his MIT colleague Mathias Dewatripont in 1993 entitled The prudential regulation of banks. This book deconstructs the Post-War New Deal banking regulation, including the Glass Steagall Act which was eventually abrogated in 1999. As such, it constitutes one of the main theoretical causes of the current financial and economic debacle.

As far as imperfect concurrence is concerned, if Chamberlin modified a bit the Marginalist paradigm to admit some imperfections on the demand side, while maintaining the typical Marginalist ex post equilibrium based on the meta-magic operation of the « invisible hand », Tirole does the same thing but on the supply side. This is far from transcending and, in fact, well below the theoretical prolegomena offered on the question by Sraffa-Robinson.

In fact, it suffices to look at the Tirole’s understanding of the antitrust rules: The European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager does far better when she criticises the abuse of fiscal optimisation as well as the location of the Head Offices of mastodons such as Apple in … nowhere land … although this does not seem to bother in the least the present socio-liberals, among whom those who fool their audiences with their « discours du Bourget » (2) in the PS, for instance.

As for the pretentious and arrogant – borrowed chutzpah? – but lightweight Cahuc, he is certainly as scientific as Tirole and perhaps even more according to their own criteria. His definitive critique was already offered by M. André Orléan and M. Pierre Noël Giraud (3), there thus is no need to lose more time on him.

In the end, when he outrageously speaks of « economic negationism » Cahuc and Co are simply using the same stale method of reversing the meaning of statements and theories in a well-known, say Talmudic, fashion but in its worse expression ever. Since the publication of my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme (4) everyone knows how this works and the effects are far from what these people think them to be. One will read with interest Pierre-Henri de Menthon’s and Airy Routier’s book entitled Théories du bordel économique 2007-2013, JC Lattès, 2013, notably as far as the role played in the « dismal discipline » by the Israeli military Daniel Kahneman.  From my perspective, it does look a bit like Planet of the Apes …

I note en passant that the example of the « invisible gorilla » used by his disciple Daniel Simons seems to come from the Gestalt theory through Paul Lafargue’s essay entitled « Problème de la connaissance ». The eminent, yet still sadly little known Marxist theoretician, recalled the case of « Blondot, the famous physician from Nancy » and his « invisible Harlequin» (5)

As we can see, the method is always the same. These authors do underline that Tirole, in his emulation of Kahneman, has abandoned the closed mathematical models for these promising new Behaviorist horizons and other promised lands of the same kind. In so doing, they simply forgot the well known weak point of American cognitive theories and of other similar theories, namely the fact that perceptions are not reality so that, sooner or later, reality corrects the former either by the incremental accumulation of contradictory facts or by brutal shocks, for instance during the unfolding of crises.

We are here well below what Koyré designated as « Baconian Empiricism ». This is truly lamentable especially when it happens to be formulated in the langue de Molière. Considering the reception of Bachelier by Henri Poincaré, we cannot avoid thinking that Tirole could have made better use of his secondary and university education. As a matter of fact, during these last decades, many mathematicians and engineers were diverted from their discipline by the fascination exercised by financial speculation (over weak and venal minds?) … an endeavor that many confuse with economic science proper.

Be it as it may, economic science, if worthy of its name, will be unable to occult my own scientific contributions, especially those offered in my Tous ensemble, in my Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy and in my Methodological introduction. (6)  I insist anew on the fact that occultation and censorship do not amount to a scientific refutation, one which must necessarily grant the right to answer according to academic deontology. Occultation and censorship only dishonor those who practice them. They are a crime against the Human Mind.

Let us now turn to classic and new false flags.

Now, things get even worse when these new versions of « scientific » Behaviorist and other such disciplines do invade the security establishments. All sorts of crackpots are then let loose. Abu Ghraib was only the known tip of the iceberg. And, of course, you are encouraged to look this up on Internet because it is essential, you had Philip Zimbardo carry out his experiments with perhaps a scientific spirit and some scientific restraints. But then, along came people like Dershowitz – has he maintained his post at Harvard? – and others of that ilk who were busy importing Israeli perverted practices in the West – where, by the way, the Mossad is illegally tolerated with many of its dirty businesses and practices in our sovereign and democratic countries and in their security apparatuses. They openly preached for the legislation of torture under medical supervision (sic!). When people in charge believe against all evidence – which, by the way, was recognised by high ranking generals – that waterboarding « works », one needs to worry and sound the alarm bell.

But this might not be the worse. Manipulations are more cynical and « devilishly sophisticated » than that because they entirely and intrusively invade the privacy and intimacy of individuals, especially those that are targeted . I already denounced them and their logic in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme (2002).

It is not only a matter of overrepresentation and false representation, of the new Inquisition and of the control of the flows of communication and other « false news » together with their new laughable « deference towards – self-proclaimed – Authority » (eg. In the dismal science or psychology etc ), or even a matter of classic so-called false flags.

Now the demonic sections of the Behaviorist and other crews are fast mastering the art of making targeted individuals tick. Freudism and American psychology – demonstrated by me to be charaltanesque falsifications in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme and other writings – were marshal to get these results thanks to new pervasive technologies. How do you entice vulnerable and isolated people, otherwise peaceful and normal, to take action and eve kill and then denounced them as « lone wolfs » and « terrorists »?

Of course, you need to provide them easy access to weapons and have part of the security establishment supervise them in an occult manner until they act. As for access to weapons, which was strangely lately made freer in the USA, you might note that one can respect the Amendment while strictly controlling the sale and possession of ammunitions etc.

The strangely targeted bans – for a late example, see http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/02/trumps-muslim-ban-really.html – and other a-constitutional Guantanamo are then imagined to protect oneself against the golems or blowbacks so laboriously created. No wonder some cynics could argue that, at times, they turn out to be useful at least if you have them neatly under control and if you are able to use them as « militants nihilists », given your fanciful certainty that, you yourself, are truly « awakened nihilists» !!! Here, just like for Marginalism, the dangers lie with overrepresented idiots ending up believing their own crap or narratives – hi-ha! – and fancying themselves to be the new « Masters of the World » ( despite Suetonius?). This sounds very dangerous to me …

Democracies need to react quickly against these practices because they are now quickly getting out of hand, and violating in the process democracy, privacy and intimacy. It is a return to barbarity. Not exactly something « We the people » really want.

I underline the fundamental fact, were the Law of Great Numbers respected, these dangerous theories and practices would never have materialised at the official level. Not only in Israel … After all, our Post-War constitutions were born from the common struggle and war against inegalitarian Nazifascism.

These rehabilitated theories and practices show an intellectual and Human pauperism at work. You notice, for instance, the restrained semantic fields of these criminal crews who are now rehabilitating Carl Schmitt because « once again » they intend to rule over the masses – sorry, over the « rubbles » to quote from their Grand Master Nietzsche – with the artificial creation of an Enemy. The new Agitprop is among us. But war is never the best option, least of all for these warmongers would end-up always the same way. As I tried to warn before it be too late, the logic of Exclusivism is implacable.

Paul De Marco, ex-professor of International  Relations – International Political Economy

Notes:

1)    See  http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/singuliere-enquete-charlie-hebdo-et-attentats/ as well as the links provided in this article.

2)     The European Commission wrote : « Both rulings endorsed an internal split of Apple Sales International’s profits for tax purposes they allocated the profits between its Irish branch and the company’s head office. It is a “so-called” head office because it exists only on paper: it has no employees, no premises and no real activities. », http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-16-2926_en.htm?locale=FR 

3)      See André Orléan’s article in http://assoeconomiepolitique.org/que-faut-il-penser-du-nouveau-cnu-andre-orlean-president-de-lafep-congres-de-lafep-mulhouse-5-juillet-2016/ . See the article by P.N Giraud « Négationnisme économique » : Pierre Cahuc s’explique face à Pierre-Noël Giraud, LE MONDE | 10.10.2016 à 18h46 • Mis à jour le 11.10.2016 à 10h26 | Par Antoine Reverchon http://www.lemonde.fr/economie-francaise/video/2016/10/10/negationnisme-economique-pierre-cahuc-s-explique-face-a-pierre-noel-giraud_5011375_1656968.html?xtmc=cahuc_et_giraud&xtcr=3 .

4)      See my  Livre II in « Download Now », section Livres-Books of the same site www.la-commune-paraclet.com . See also in the same site the section Fascism/Racism/Exclusvism. 

5)      Paul Lafargue, « Le problème de la connaissance », dans https://www.marxists.org/francais/lafargue/works/1910/12/lafargue_19101215.htm

6)      See the section Livres-Books in www.la-commune-paraclet.com  

 xxx

HISTORICAL MEMORY IS A DUTY: WHAT DO I MEAN BY THE PHRASE « PHILO-SEMITE NIETZSCHEAN » ?

On December 8, 2016, in response to the email  « Illegitimate budget and ruinous loan from the EMS » – in Italian: « Legge di bilancio illegittima e rovinoso prestito al ESM » – sent on December 7,  2016 to <[email protected]>, I was asked the following question which I now translate for you together with my response: « Mr. Paolo De Marco, could you kindly explain to us what you mean by « philo-Semite Nietschean Italy » ? »

Given the vital relevance of the question, in particular for all Western nations, I decided to make my answer publicly available with the hope that it will be widely diffused.  My answer is squarely based on the cardinal principles enshrined within the Italian Constitution that was born out of the Resistance to Nazifascism; it is equally based on the compatible and complementary principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of the Individual and Social Human Rights of the Person and in the fundamental Charter of the United Nations.

I hasten to add that the various Citizens’ committees should bring the European Commission and the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance in court for having consciously falsified the budget law, now congealed for illegal and vulgar electoral motivations, uniquely because the EU was trying to help the discredited Renzi’s Government to win its referendum over the Renzi-Gutgeld’s inspired constitutional counter-reform. (1) Such a degeneration of democracy and such a vulgar meddling into the domestic affairs of Italy cannot be tolerated. Meanwhile, the so-called Constitutional Rainbow Alliance must be reconstructed in view of the necessary, though now transversally forgotten, referendum on the Jobs Act.

Here then is my response:

« Yes, indeed, it will be a pleasure. The phrase « philo-Semite Nietzschean », which I otherwise never have dreamed to use before I was faced with this very dangerous political, intellectual and Ethico-political regression, appeared in the American re-editing of Nietzsche’s books. See The portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books ed, 1982, The basic writing of Nietzsche, equally translated by Walter Kaufmann, 2000 Modern Library Edition, The will to power, Vintage Books Edition, 1968. Unbelievably, the attempt is made here to rehabilitate Nietzsche (sic!) with the retro-active pretext that he was not anti-Semitic, in the sense of anti-Jewish – note that we are dealing here with a typical alienation to vocabulary since Arabs also belong to Semitic nations. This statement rests only on some fringe notes written by Nietzsche, in which he imagined the forging of his his « superior race » the « breeding » of Jewesses and Prussian Junkers!!! (Added note: What does this tell you about the current marital practices of dominant American and of some others Western Nations’ elites?)

In my Marxist candor at the time, I was at most condemning what I called « Right-wing Zionism » while backing Isaac Rabin over the Oslo Accords. At the same time, I proposed my own « Camp David II » – see in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme in the Livres-Books section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com . You can also check the Fascism, Racism/Exclusivism section of the same site.)

This proposal represented the unique alternative to peace. It gave rise – without any reference to my proposal, of course  – to the unofficial Geneva Accords. As you know, these otherwise generous and intelligent accords gave rise to the demonic and murderous provocation by the war criminal Ariel Sharon on the Al-Haram Al-Sharif. This bloody provocation could not have been carried out without the full knowledge of the Israeli government of the time – and that of the blind Zionist Perez.

This represents a very serious regression into barbarity. See my essay « Nietzsche as an awakened nightmare » in the section Livres-Books of the site www.la-commune-paraclet.com . See also, albeit written in my then hazardous Italian, « Elogio della Ragione e della laicità » (also available in English as « In Praise of Reason and of the secular State » in the Fascim/Racism/Exclusivism Section of the above quoted site.)

At the international level, this un-eared of regression took the form of « the clashes of civilisations » that were ideated by the American-Jew Samuel Huntington, the father of « strategic hamlets » implemented in Guatemala and Vietnam. This longer view and strategic choice informs the current and disastrous wars of civilization, all masked as wars against undefined « terrorism ». We all know that Al Qaeda and ISIS were imagined, created and financed by the Mossad and by the United-States of America with the financial help of the Arabic petro-monarchies.

The same Huntington with others – including the American-Jew Dershowitz, the one who, even in his post at Harvard (?), did not hesitate to preach the importation of Israeli techniques in the US and in the West such as torture under medical surveillance (?). These are monstrous and evil preachings which fly directly in the face of our egalitarian constitutions. These same people equally ideated the control of « communication flows », the  return to « deference to Authority – self-conferred Authority, of course, such as that of the incestuously chosen so-called « Nobel » Prizes in the dismal science » !!! This regressive trend brought us the totalitarian spirit enshrined in the Patriot Act and the various and second-rate European copies. We are here confronted with a « return » to a new Counter-Reformation complete with its Inquisition and its Index.

I am a Marxist and I remain deeply attached to the anti-Nazifascist constitutional principles. Marx was one of the first and certainly the most brilliant critique of Human inequality, especially when embodied by theocratic and racist Exclusivism. Nietzsche, together with the philo-Semite Nietzschean sections and deviated lodges, be they old or modern – Margarita Sarfatti, Rosenberg, etc., etc. – were and continue to be the most insidious propagandizers of this most sectarian and dangerous brand of Exclusivism.

No democracy can ever exist if these ideologies are not condemned – In effect, this condemnation is constitutionally enshrined in the Article XII of the transitory and definitive dispositions of the Italian Constitution born from the Resistance. (The Fathers of the Constitution did not ignore the role of the Italian-Jew Margherita Sarfatti and that of his father in financing the most reactionary movements – and Catholic Popes – in Italy as well as the fascist Mussolini, Sarfatti’s pupil, lover and financed puppet. Despite this all, today the re-emergence of movements such as Casa Pound are tolerated. False representation and over-representation are now perilously making a return in the Western political scene, and even more so in our Italy, a country with « limited sovereignty ». Over-representation is now so grotesquely obvious even for the naked eye that there is no need to refer to the Law of Great Numbers.

I have explained – for instance, in my « Praise » above mentioned – that the logic of Exclusivism ineluctably leads to conflict and annihilation wars. That was the case during the Second World War. It is again the case today, the vanguard of this « return » to barbarity being evidenced in the will to destroy more than 66 Muslim countries in order to build a Greater Israel in a Greater but firmly dominated Middle-East. Without speaking of « regime change » … In brief, the great lunatic design consists in destroying the State-nation, the cradle of the people’s sovereignty in order to return to an Empire ruled by a brand of soft fascism, made of self-(divine)-election and false and incestuous meritocracy.

I hope I have answered you question. If any other clarifications are needed, do not hesitate to ask. For instance, a form of philo-Semite Nietzscheanism in Italy before the disastrous so-called Social Pact of 1992, is to be found in the insidious work of Altiero Spinelli. This is why I equally exposed and denounced Spinellian Italy together with the anti-constitutional Spinellian federalism which, from the beginning attempted to infeudated the European integration process in overarching Atlantic ties.

In Italy those who know do not dare speak out (the « fiorentina » costs a lot, to be sure.) As for the others they are sufficiently ignorant thanks to the pervasive strong intimidation tactics and censorship that are exercised every time someone even tries to discuss these fundamental issues, if for no other reason than to explain the constitutional basis of Article XI of our anti-Fascist, or anti-philo-Semite Nietzschean, Constitution which repudiates war, other than strictly defensive wars, as a mean to resolve international conflicts.

Paul De Marco, ex-professor of International Relations – International Political Economy.

Note:

1. (Added note: They lost miserably but are now desperately clinging to power with anticipated elections devised to avoid the referendum on the Jobs Act, which they are certain to lose.) As we all know, Italy already got a margin of 19 billion Euros. This was quickly squandered in the most vulgar and clientelistic fashion – 80 Euros on some paychecks, useless Jobs Act exonerations amounting to 18 billion euros in the first year, abolition of the residential municipal tax for the rich, Ires and Irap reductions and so on and so forth, these on top of close to 350 billion euros in annual tax expenditures and about that much in fiscal evasion… Despite all of this, everyone knew before the December 4^th Referendum that the budget numbers did not square out. See:  « Iva al 25% nel 2018: la pesante eredità di Renzi, O si trovano 42 miliardi in due anni o scattano le clausole di salvaguardia » http://quifinanza.it/tasse/iva-al-25-nel-2018-la-pesante-eredita-di-renzi/97348/?ref=virgilio.

I hasten to add that austerity policies are fast destroying Italy. However, this does not imply that we should exit the Eurozone or the EU with an Italexit imagined to be negotiated within the very same parameters. Instead it is feasible to change the socio-economic paradigm in order to remain within the Eurozone and the E. Indeed, the EU is a regional integration process of which Italy was one of the main proponents and one of the three great founding nations. This is because money – which for now can be left to the ECB – does not equate to credit. Credit remains within national powers according to Article 47 of the Italian Constitution, the very same which we saved on December 4^th , 2016. Above all, money and public credit cannot be equated: They are not the one and same thing. (see my Synopsis of Marxist Political Economy on the subject.)

Similarly the Lisbon Treaty is just a treaty, not a constitution. This means that it can be changed with relative ease trough renegotiation. Be it as it may, the Lisbon Treaty unambiguously states that Social Affairs are a exclusive national power of the member States. See in Download Now, section Livres-Books in www.la-commune-paraclet.com « To save the Eurozone we must terminate the so-called universal bank ».

XXX

Brief notes on Joachim of Fiore Pythagorean

Presented at the Conference organized by the Gunesh cultural association on August 27, 2016.

(English translation)

1)    Introduction

2)    Plato’s Republic and « true lie »

3)    Joachim’s Republic or the Project for a New Order as it appears in Table XII of the Liber Figurarum.

4)    Joachim’s dialectics of becoming opposed to the static view of Pietro Lombardo

5)    Conclusion: It is primordial to return to the spirit of Jure Vetere.

1)    Introduction: There are two basic modes to apprehend reality: Science and narratives.

.1       Science is necessarily egalitarian because any human discourse presupposes interlocutors who belong to the same Human species. They share the same « inter-subjective » space. The search for truth supposes  the possibility to attempt to falsify any thesis presented as true and thus presupposes open debates.

.2       A narrative can either be pedagogical in nature or exclusivist. The pedagogical narrative was useful before the generalisation of public education. Exclusivist narratives have a specific objective, to block the road to science in order to enforce Human inequality.

The Pythagoreans were adepts of the scientific mode of reasoning. However, after the violent destruction of their School by Cilon of Crotone, they went underground and passed on their scientific knowledge to their disciples who were more or less initiated. In the Middle Ages these were to be found mainly among architects, monks, doctors of medicine and objective alchemists, that is to say those preoccupied by the practical work on metals necessary for commerce and for war.

The transmission of their knowledge to the masses, then generally uneducated, was done by resorting to didactic narratives proposed in the form of myths and religions, the latter with their rituals.

We will demonstrate that Joachim was a strong partisan of science. We can already provide two illustrations.

The first concerns the 3 Ages proposed by the Calabrian Abbot. They are based on the stages of the psychological and intellectual historical becoming of the individual, a fundamental thesis which will be found again in the works of the founder of the modern science of History, Giambattista Vico, and more particularly in his Autobiography and in his New Science.

The second concerns scientific didactics as opposed to narrative didactics. Joachim took great care in illustrating his major theses with figures. He also thought that the times had arrived to substitute scientific teaching to the usual mythological didactical narratives. This attitude is perfectly exemplified by his conviction that the Eucharistic story and rituals could now be transcended. Here the Calabrian Abbot did not hesitate to underline the qualitative leap forward. Whereas the substitution of symbolic sacrifice to real sacrifice amounted to a real progress, he believed that the times had now arrived for the former to leave way to Ethics, that is to say to the duty of any Human consciousness to discern between Good and evil. This is because Human consciousness was was now informed by science, or as he put it, it was now illuminated by the Holy Spirit.

We are witnessing here a civilizational giant step forward. As A. Vacant noted on this subject: « Just as the immolation of the Eater lamb ended with Christ, likewise with the manifestation of the Spirit all use of figures will cease.» (1) Many historian of religions have underlined the importance of the transition from real to symbolic sacrifice. Joachim pushed the reasoning further with great coherence because a Mind or consciousness that is finally educated, has no more need of intermediary, not even symbols, in order to live ethically.

2)    Plato’s Republic and the « true lie ». 

In its most famous work Plato explains the didactic role played by the « true lie » in opposition to « lies in words », namely false narratives.

Plato presents a reformed City able to lead to Ethical collective and individual Good. Whereas the City was thought of in scientific terms, the question remained on how to induce all of its members to accept it. This is the very same question raised for all progressive and socialist reformers, first among these at least for the Modern thinkers none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not only did he write the Social contract, he equally wrote two projects of constitution, one for Corsica and another for Poland. In doing this, he carefully took into account the respective contexts, thus inaugurating the theory of transition.    

The City of Plato naturally remained a reference for all subsequent attempts at social reform, including the New Order Project imagined by Joachim of Fiore.

In his Republic, Plato proposed a radical reform of the City, that is to say of life in the Community.

The aim of the reform was to think of a City or Res-pubblica capable to afford to all its members the greatest expression of one’s one personality ,thus optimizing common good. The criteria for evaluation was an ethico-political one – to use Gramsci’s phrase – from the individual as much as from the collective points of view.

What is privileged is the renunciation of evil and the progressive progress from utilitarian Good towards disinterested or spiritual Good. At this stage, Man and Humanity will be free, both being now able to realise their best potential.

In order to implement the reform leading to the Republic, Socrates proposed various institutions, over and above the development of an adapted educational system respectful of Human diversity. The task of these institutions was to guarantee the stability of the City. In short, we have here the diametrical opposite of the so-called « buona scuola », the obscurantist and nepotistic – see the role of deans – and exclusivist version imagined by Renzi-Gutgeld and few others of the same ilk. (See the pertinent articles in this same site.)

The social hierarchy that was proposed functioned in the following manner, in the respect of the three functions of the Human soul – or, in modern parlance, of consciousness – namely reason, angriness and desire, the triptych that points to the head, the heart and the belly or again to wisdom, courage and temperance.

This social trinity was symbolised by three metals:

–         Gold: the magistrates/the head/wisdom

–         Silver: the guardians/the heart/courage

–         Bronze or steel: the producers/the belly/temperance

We are definitively not confronted here with the usual Indo-European casts – for instance as laid out by Dumézil – in which position is inherited. In any case, in India, casts are always multiple – they are developed according to need – and the general schemata is more Quaternary than Trinitarian. In Plato-Socrates’ Republic , or if you will in the Pythagorean republic, the flexibility of the whole edifice is insured by education, that is to say by the authentic social mobility it induces.

In effect, in his Menon, Plato shows how maïeutics can allow the young uneducated slave to rediscover the demonstration of the doubling of the square. Even Aristotle  – see his Politics –  knew that there were no elected races or groups, slavery’s sole explanation being to be found in the fortune of war.

This Socratic construction is far from being antithetical to Human equality, on the contrary it presupposes it. There remains though the problem of the systemic reproduction of this construction. Its stability cannot rests only on the shoulders of the magistrates and of the guardians. It must emanate from a more general ethico-political consensus.

As we said above, this problem confronted all Ancient and Modern reformists and revolutionaries from Joachim of Fiore, to Giordano Bruno and Campanella, to Thomas More, Giambattista Vico, Babeuf and Thomas Paine up to the modern Marxists.

Seen from this angle, to back up the role played by education, Socrates resorts to myths. More precisely to two myths.

1)    That of the « metallic » distinction of the souls among themselves, which at the level of didactical appearances aims at inducing the right form of socialisation. This myth gives rise to various social rituals.

2)    The proto-religious Myth of Er the Pamphylian with which Plato ends his masterpiece, the Republic. Here the avowed objective is to sustain the march of consciousness towards its own betterment. (2)

We are thus dealing here with « true lies » otherwise known as « noble lies » which are deemed necessary to assist the progressive progress of souls – or consciousness – towards Ethical Good and thus towards Human emancipation within the reformed City.

As we will see, this pedagogical role of the narratives is essential for Joachim, above all for the transition to the Age of the Spirit. This is the very heart of his concordance system.

It might be useful to provide here a very brief summary of the Myth of Er the Pamphylian, simply because once one substitutes the Pythagorean metempsychosis with Egyptian-Christian resurrection, the scene displays many similarity to Christian mental imagery.

Er tells of his return from the land of the dead. The souls arrive at a nice mysterious place to be judged. The sentences multiply by 10 their actions, be they good or bad. The souls according to the judgement passed on them were directed towards one of the twin vortexes which lead on the right towards the sky and on the left deep under the hearth for 1000 year of blissfulness or of suffering. (The great fresco of the Last Judgement by Michelangelo as well as the circles and the economy of joys and pains in Dante’s Divina Commedia are taken from this source.)

The objective of the Socratic reincarnation is to encourage the souls in there terrestrial progress towards Ethical Good.

For Clemente of Alexandria, the Myth of Er was arching back to certain aspects of the reforms proposed by Zoroaster, who was well-known to Pythagoras the contemporary of Buddha as well as to Socrates. Both used them albeit in their own critical fashion.

Monotheism proper results from a Pythagorean-Socratic influence. Even the Gods of the Classical Greeks had been judged according to the Idea of Ethical Good and subordinated to it, or better repudiated by it. The Old Testament was still speaking of Eloim in the plural.

To conclude this first part, we want to underline the fact that religion or better spirituality is far from being an Opium for the people, it is a narrative. It becomes obscurantist and obnoxious when it contradicts the progress of science, including when it occults the Marxist theory of psychoanalysis that I proposed as a definitive debunking and repudiation of bourgeois charlatanesque psychological theories, in particular the exclusivist and inegalitarian ones forged by Sigmund Freud. (3)

In effect, to cancel any doubt in his readers’ mind, Plato spins the essential Pythagorean cosmology into his Myth of Er. You then have the Seven planets plus the « fixed » stars, all being connected to each others by Ananke’s fuse – Ananke being the goddess of Necessity -, which explains their movements in allegorical terms. With the help of her three daughters, the Fates Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos the destiny of the Cosmos and of Human souls is spun out.

Lachesis represents the past, Clotho the present and Atropos the future. We have here the allegorical basis of Human becoming written in the cosmic cycles. The progressive purification of the souls thanks to the metempsychosis process happens within the temporal cycles of the Cosmos.

As we will see, this didactical schemata informed Joachim of Fiore, and this pitted him against the static steady state, say Aristotelian, vision of mainstream thinkers and theologians such a Pietro Lombardo.

3.The Republic of Joachim or more precisely his Project for a New Order exposed in the Table XII of his Liber Figurarum.   

The New Order hoped for is an Age of justice, peace, freedom and gender equality, in which the Abbot partook in the manual labor of the Community, Joachim taking here his cue literally from the Benedictine’s motto « Ora et labora ». We like to recall that Gramsci’s newspaper, which signaled the ethico-political rebirth of our country in the beginning of the Twentieth Century was appropriately called Ordine Nuovo.

Table XII is most import at least as far as the general schemata is concerned. It must necessarily reflect the Rule of the Florense Order which is unfortunately occulted even today. This is incomprehensible because there was a time when the Order was the most important in Calabria when Calabria itself was at the center of the civilized Western world. The Order was then composed of a great number of convents and granges. Each of these settlements would have had a copy of the Rule or institutions as well as the Vatican. It simply is not plausible that they all were lost.

The New Order announced and reflected the emergence of the Age of the Spirit, more particularly, as already underlined by Buonaiuti and Mottù, as the expression of the secularization of the Spirit.

Joachim proceeds in a typical Pythagorean-scientific mode. The development of all the intelligences necessary to the Community is backed up with a new and adjourned pedagogical narrative. For Joachim, all forms of intelligence have the same dignity because they are all similarly necessary to the harmony of the reformed City and of the Individuals who compose it.

The briefest and simplest method to demonstrate this consists in the exam of the evolution of the Tetramorph from its Christian use compatible with the Age of the Son, that is to say with an Age in which the masses were still uneducated thus needing the help of intermediaries and examples, towards the Joachimite reformulation congruent with the Age of the Spirit, the Age of individual and collective Liberty.

Examination of the Tetramorph and of Table XII.

The Tetramorph sends one back to the science of astronomy and the great cosmic cycles developed by the Ancient Egyptians, in particular as it concerns the solstices, the equinoxes and above all the precession of the Equinoxes.

I always like to use René Descartes’ remark according to which in order to organize an unlimited space one must first determine a fixed point. The Great Pyramid does exactly this. (4) It is oriented precisely towards the four (4) stars with their respective constellations, which apparently always maintain the same relations among themselves: These define the Tetramorph. Pythagoras, together with his immediate disciples, among whom Filolao well known by Nicholas de Cues and Giordano Bruno – for them the center of the Universe is everywhere; similarly they knew that the so-called « fixed stars » were not still. A great part of Pythagoras’ own initiation happened in Egypt. From here derived the essential importance of the Tetramorph and of its symbols.

Now imagine a square with its four corners. The top-left corner was aligned on the Star Fomalhaut, today known as Acquarius and its symbol was the Angel. In the top-right corner you have the Star Antares in the Scorpion constellation and its symbol is the Eagle. In the bottom-right corner you find the Star Regulus in the constellation of the Lion. In the bottom-left corner, you find the Star Adelbaran in the constellation of the Taurus. In the center, that is at the intersection of the two diagonals of the great pyramid you have the symbol pi,  Π. (5)

Christianity followed this schemata ant its symbols in accordance with my thesis of Christ as a Pythagorean master. It served in consolidating the Doxa of the Christian Roman Church against the various Judeo-Christian interpretations and even more forcefully against the various Gnostic interpretations. For instance, Irene wrote that they had to be 4 Gospels and no more because there were 4 climates, 4 corners to the World, 4 revelations – Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus – and 4 animals in the Cherub, that is to say in the Tetramorph and 4 mystical Beasts in the Apocalypses of John Evangelist. (6)

The Christian symbols are found everywhere in the architecture, in the paintings etc. The re-oriented Square becomes a cross. On top, we find the Eagle which represent the Gospel of John Evangelist. On the right, we find Man or the Angel which represents Matthew. On the bottom, we find the Ox or Taurus which represents Luke and on the left, the Lion which represents Marc. In the center, we have Christ.

Keeping this in mind the Table XII is finally self-explanatory as the representation of the Tetramorph now seen from the angle of the becoming of the Three Ages of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. To examine the Table XII please click here : https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Figurarum. In then suffices to click on the Table entitled « Project of the New Monastic Order » to enlarge it. Then just minimize it to read it simultaneously with the following comment. The term « monastic » is ambiguous and does not seem essential nor authentic to me, if only because the Joachimite New Order did not only concern monks but instead the whole Community.

The Tetramorph reformulated by Joachim of Fiore is a Greek cross with a pedestal; this is because Joachim sincerely hoped to reconciliate the Roman Church with the Orthodox Church, namely the two branches of great monotheist religion, hoping also to « convert » the Jews and the Muslims.

This Cross renews the symbols and includes a representation of the various intelligences, the 5 general and the 7 spiritual intelligences. (7) The 5 general intelligences which can be found in Joachim’s Tetramorph are: the historical – relative to the similarity of the visible and invisible things; the moral – idem but in a partial mode; the tropological – which deals with what pertains to the doctrine; the contemplative – which deals with the inspiration by the Holy Spirit; the anagogical – which belongs to the Supreme Knowledge. For the 7 forms of intelligences, it suffices to say here that they complete the typology of the Concordia and its Three Ages with Seven epochs, thus reflecting the Joachimite re-interpretation of Augustine’s City of God.

Let us start with the pedestal of Joachim’s cross formed by two houses. The one at the bottom is dedicated to S. Abrahams, that is to say to the Patriarchs – both secular and married. This is the Age of the Father or of Authority. Immediately above there is a smaller house dedicated to S. John the Baptist, namely to the sacerdotal class … and priests. This is the Age of the Son with its annunciation by St John the Baptist or the Age of intermediation and example. Above, we now found the new Joachimite version of the Tetramorph, which represents the Third Age, the Age of the Holy Spirit.

Joachim’s Tetramorph starts from the earlier Christian version adding important changes which correspond to his New Order intended as the historical transcending of the existing Christian order of his time.

On the top, we find the Eagle symbolizing S. John Evangelist and contemplative intelligence. On the right, we find Man symbolizing S. Paul and the Doctors, namely meditative and tropologica intelligences. On the bottom, we find the Taurus symbolizing S. Stefan, that is to say the Martyrs and the laborers, or historical knowledge. On the left, we find the Lion symbolizing S. Peter, namely the Ancients or Sages and the Apostles, that is to say wisdom and moral intelligence. At the center, we no find the secularization of the Spirit which dialectically transcends the Age of the Son and therefore the center is now occupied by the Dove which symbolizes the Abbot of the New Order to whom everyone owes « obedience », namely anagogic intelligence. Deference to self-proclaimed « authority » disappears, being only due to science which alone can lead all equally to Ethical Good. The Abbot of Florense Order was elected and took his share of the Community manual tasks.

Joachim could hardly have been clearer. This Table or figure is a truly remarkable « aide-mémoire » of his major writings. The same reading can be made for the Table entitled « Il salterio delle 10 cordi » but this time the key is even more clearly Pythagorean.

Joachim’s New Order will later inform all the subsequent reformist theoreticians in a great lineage that goes from the various early Joachimites, to Thomas Müntzer (8), Giordano Bruno and Campanella, Vico, Marx, Paul Lafargue, Mao Zedong, Gramsci and modestly …us!

For instance, the Three Ages of Giambattista Vico, the founder of the modern science of History, reflect those of Joachim of Fiore. Here is a very brief summary of Vico’s New Science taken from wikipedia.

1)    The Age of gods « in which Man thought he lived under divine government and everything ordered to him derived from auspicises and oracles. »

2)    The Age of heroes, during which aristocratic republic were founded.

3)    The Age of Man « in which every person recognised her/himself equal to any other in terms of Human nature. »

4. The Joachimite dialectics of Human becoming against the static steady state thought of Pietro Lombardo.

The  scientific character of the Florense Abbot is never as shining as in his methodology, his dialectical logic. You might recall the two crucial observations made by the Young Benedetto Croce in his youthful masterpiece, in truth is best work, entitled What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,  International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 27 [1917] (10)

1)    Becoming said Croce is the first « concrete concept ».

2)    To apprehend it one must abandon the false Aristotelian categories, derived from a static taxonomy and distinguish between distinct and opposed categories.

As everyone knows, the Roman Church tried to maintain the statu quo at all cost against the demands of progressive social forces; it thus organized a rearguard struggle which ushered into the Counter-Reform and the abuse of ferocious inquisitorial repressive force. In that battle the Church tried blindly to buttress itself by leaning against a now stale and outdated Aristotelian, that is to say a static, vision of the world. It continued doing this even after Copernicus and Galileo!

We should underline the fact that the reactionary criticism laid out against Plato’s Republic offered by Aristotle does no rest on presumed organizational errors  – for instance with respect to the coherence of the Human reproduction system that was proposed – but, instead, on the substitution of the basic unit used to analyse society and politics. While Pythagoras-Socrates-Plato start from Human society without any a-historical prejudices or presuppositions, Aristotle squarely and arbitrarily places the family at the center of his system. Etymologically speaking, famiglia means domesticity and it is a basically hierarchic and conservative structure opposed to gender equality.

One might remember that accordingly in his Holy Family the Young Marx along side with his emancipation triptych, argued in favor of the transcending of the family, not to be confused with free and freely agreed civil unions. Naturally, this truly fundamental book of Marx included his « Jewish question » which happens to be the greatest anti-exclusivist manifesto ever written, and without which no form of bourgeois or socialist democracy can ever be conceived. The Triptych of Emancipation includes that from religion or laicity – separation of Church and State; that from political subordination, or demo-cracy; and the emancipation from Human servitude which presupposes the end of the exploitation of Man by Man. (With regard to the family see my essay « Marriage, civil unions and the institutionalizing of costumes » see below or for the French and Italian version in the Pink Section of my site www.la-commune-paraclet.com )

For the Church, Human, social and intellectual becoming had to be expelled in order to preserve the monopoly of salvation safely in the hands of the Church hierarchies. (11) This is the exact opposite of the dialectical Pythagorean-Socratic progression towards individual and collective Ethical Good.

The first obscurantist onslaught was indeed waged against our Joachim. In effect, at Anagni (1215) the Church tried to strike the Florense Order in the heart at a time when the Order was already forced to retreat from Jure Vetere after what can only be characterised, at least for me, – hypothesis to be looked into – as a criminal fire. Thus the Florense Monks were forced to leave the protocenobio built by their founder to announce the ushering of the New Age of the Holy Spirit and to re-integrate the Cistercian Order which Joachim had left. (12) But despite it all the Church was unable to officially condemn Joachim, if only because he had managed to have the backing of three popes to conduct his work.

But the Church malignly condemned the theory of Trinity that Joachim rightly opposed to that of Pietro Lombard. In so doing, it was attempting to strike a deadly blow to the Florense Trinitarian Dialectics from which naturally flows Human becoming conceived as the secularization of the Spirit – i.e. Human consciousness – or, if you will, conceived as the ushering of Human liberty.

This is easy to demonstrate. Joachim rightly accused Lombardo for his confusing natura and gender, and thus getting confused over the dialectical tie  which holds together the Christian Trinity, namely the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It suffices to take a look at the Sentenze of Pietro Lombardo. The Sentenze include 4 books:

a)     Trinity

b)    Creation

c)     Christ

d)    Salvation – through the Church intermediation

It is a problematic salvation in any case, at least before Judgement Day ,with all the added problems which were left unresolved since the early days of Christianity, namely that of grace or predestination.

It goes without saying that Joachim as a dialectical thinker could not accept the dubious Trinity featuring only one member who was incarnated and active in History, namely Christ, and, what is more, a Christ mediated by the hierarchies of the Church.

But what is really meant by the accusation of quaternarity laid by the Calabrian Abbot against Lombardo? One crucial thing, namely the conceptual and practical relationships entertained by essence and substance. For Joachim, when P. Lombardo speaks of divine essence, which encompasses the Trinity, he add a fourth element in the most illegitimate fashion. What is more, according to Buonaiuti, he does provide « a presentation of the Trinity that impeded an harmonious application to the various aspects of the development of Revelation in History. » (13) In short, it was illogical and did not explain the progressive unfolding of the Joachimite Three Ages.

As far as Joachim was concerned, as an honest and rigorous logician just like Giordano Bruno, Kant and Marx were later on, it was unthinkable to confuse essence, substance and gender.

En effect, Joachim’s Trinity – just like an unfolding syllogism – is simultaneously one and plural in its manifestations. (14) Giordano Bruno will later speak of monad and of its historical forms, thus exercising a great influence on Spinoza and Marx. That of Joachim is indeed and eminently a dialectical, hence historical, thought.

Let us sum up the ontology and the dialectical theory of Joachim. If you keep in mind the syllogistic unfolding from the major premise, to the minor and to the conclusion, it then will clearly appear how the Calabrian Abbot’s thought prefigured the method of Historical materialism.

Essence (or transcendence): Father                           Son                 Holy Spirit

||

Historical Subject:                Old Testament             Church            Ecclesia (Florense Order.

Commune of Paris 1871)

||

Substance ( historical            1^st Age                         2d Age            3d Age                    immanence)

The term « ecclesia » needs to be understood in its etymological sense, which sends us back to the early Christian egalitarian communities.

In Althusserian terms, originally drawn from Vico, we here have the historical pivot or invariant along which Humanity progresses in its historical becoming, a process which equally contains its spiritual becoming, namely the end of alienation understood as the « recovery of Man by Himself » as Marx would put it later.

5. We must return to the spirit of Jure Vetere.

Years ago I wrote an essay entitled  « S. Francesco padrone d’Italia, Gioacchino e Marx compagni del Mondo » (6 ottobre 2004) (17) Joachim dedicated Jure Vetere to the Pythagorean scientific tradition. As I mentioned in earlier notes, the name Jure Vetere send us back to Ancient Law, namely to the Pythagorean School. It is useful to recall here the legend according to which the Ancient Romans asked the Sibyl what they should do in order to become a great people. The answer was to raise a statue to the greatest man in History. Thus the Romans erected a statue to Pythagoras. The truth is that Pythagoras wrote the constitution of the Italiots. Furthermore, the Pythagorean principles incorporated within the Romans’ republican constitution were not betrayed before the exclusivist transition to the Empire – the same old story of divine right and especially elected groups; see also Alexander the Great in Persia versus his Macedonian troupes and Aristotle. For Ancient Rome the regressive transition took place despite Brutus (18) at least up until Titus found himself obliged to remedy with the destruction of the Jewish Temple.

The interpretation « jure » for « fiore » of flower is sympathetic but off subject (Added note: February 2017: According to legend, Joachim established his settlement just were his oxes had stopped. Calabria is also known as Magna Grecia. One will find the same stories for new settlements in the Ancient Greek mythology, linked to auspicious rituals. This send us back to the cultural context. Joachim was born at Celico, one of the most beautiful and characteristic Byzantine city in Calabria. However, the Latin etymology tells the real story.) In fact, when I visited the Museo dei Brettii e degli Enottri in Cosenza, I was able to admire the Stela di Badessa which makes it clear that the name Fiore was a patronymic name of a Roman family. (19) The Sila has always been an important crossroad and an apparently inexhaustible reserve of wood for construction and especially for shipbuilding. This must be investigated more thoroughly. It is clear however that the settlement of San Giovanni in Fiore existed before Jure Vetere under other names, for instance that of Faraclonus.

Aside from the pre-existent Domus, San Giovanni in Fiore started to develop after the fire which destroyed Jure Vetere. After the death of the Calabrian Abbot in 1202, heavy pressures were exercised on his Florense Order. This reactionary policy culminated in the condemnation of Joachim’s opuscule on Trinity during the Lateranese Council of 1215. It was said that the opuscule had been lost; at time it was said that it had not been written by Joachim, yet the content of Joachim’s small treatise appears clearly in the formulation of the Council’s motivation for its condemnation. This content is in perfect accord with the major ideas and above all with the rigorous methodology which characterises the writing of the great Calabrian Abbot.

The Abbey of San Giovanni in Fiore is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and thus represents a tragic symbolic and institutional retreat toward the annunciation of Christ, whereas Jure Vetere had been erected to announce the ushering of the Age of the Holy Spirit, that is to say the historical transcending of the anterior Ages.

After Anagni and even more after the revolt of the peasants led by Thomas Müntzer in 1525, a sustained attempt was made to eradicate the Message of the Calabrian Abbot. Here is a brief summary (20):

In 1354 the Abbey was sacked by the petty lord of Caccuri, Squarcia di Rio, a vandal action that lead to the devastation of the Library.

In 1500 Pope Alexander VI Borgia created a Commenda entrusted to Slavatore Rota.

Around 1530, Rota caused the erection of the so-called Main Church of San Giovanni in Fiore, in order to substitute it to the old Florense Abbey which was then abandoned.

On February 5, 1571, after the Trent Council – 1545-1563, that is to say after the very Council which unleashed the Counter-Reformation – Pope Pius V nominated Commendatore Cardinal Giulio Santoro. This Santoro was one of the main inquisitors who had condemned Giordano Bruno and T. Campanella.

We are confronted here with a true doctrinal « cleansing ». Nonetheless, Joachim’s message will bloom again with renewed scientific vigor with G. Bruno, Campanella and Giambattista Vico … It also found its way in the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, the great modern thinker who provided the inspiration for the Constituting Assembly which lead to our Italian Constitution of 1948, naturally without forgetting the transitional phase embodied in Mazzini’s conception of a secular spirituality fit for the new Italy he strived for.

During the era of « national awakening », the notables in San Giovanni in Fiore were responsible for the capture of the Bandiera Brothers. Meanwhile Oscar Wilde was celebrating the Calabrian heros who had died in the Aspromonte for the emancipation of Italy in his magnificent poem Humanitad. See http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/humanitad/

6. Conclusion

This is why, the rebirth of our City, of our Region and indeed of our Nation depends on our capacity to renew the emancipating thinking of our founder, the Calabrian Abbot endowed with prophetic spirit.

Paul De Marco  Copyright © La Commune Inc, August 24, 2016 (translated February 7, 2017)

Notes:

1. See in https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_de_Flore#cite_note-dico-8
2. For the Myth of Er the Pamphylian see:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2H_4_0013 (to go directly to the text use the term « pamphylian » in the search function.)
3. See my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme, in particular the second part which is partially available in English in the Livres-Books section of the site www.la-commune-paraclet.com . For the first time, this book analysed the scientific nexus between religion, archeoastronomy and Marxist psychoanalysis. Despite its ISBN number it has been widely and incorrectly pillaged but never quoted. Without my contribution a new obscurantism was emerging on the subject. See also the Note 5 of my essay « Appunti su Gioacchino da Fiore e San Giovanni in Fiore: il messagio, la sua difesa e la sua falsificazione », section Italia of the same site. Some English notes on the subject are equally available.
4. Vedi in https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Figurarum
5. For the Tetramorph and the Great Pyramid see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFpHDXUgcqw at 1:25:16. This video seems to be the object of a constant censorship; however, it is always possible to find a version on the Net. For the importance of the number pi, as well as archeoastronomy and the Marxist theory of psychoanalysis see my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme, 2002, in particular the Second Section, in part translated in English in the section Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com as well as in Italian in Contra-pitre in the section Italia of the same site.
6. See Ernest Renan Histoire des origines du Christianisme: L’Antéchrist, Les Evangiles, l’Eglise chrétienne et Marc-Aurèle, Robert Laffont, S.A. Paris, 1995, page 748. Ernest Renan, as well as Jules Michelet, was a great connaisseur of Joachim of Fiore as is demonstrated by his Dictionnaire, in Histoire des origines du Christianisme: Vie de Jésus, Les Apôtres, Saint Paul, idem.
7. For a brief discussion of the various intelligences see Ernesto Buonaiuti, Gioacchino da Fiore, i tempi-la vita-il messagio, Lionello Giordano Editore – Cosenza, 1984, p 177.
8. See Marx-Engels, The Peasant war in Germany, in https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm . Quote: « Thomas Muenzer was born in Stolberg, in the Harz, in 1498. It is said that his father died on the scaffold, a victim of the wilfulness of the Count of Stolberg. In his fifteenth year, Muenzer organised at the Halle school a secret union against the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Roman Church in general. His scholarly attainments in the theology of his time brought him early the doctor’s degree and the position of chaplain in a Halle nunnery. Here he began to treat the dogmas and rites of the church with the greatest contempt. At mass he omitted the words of the transubstantiation, and ate, as Luther said, the almighty gods unconsecrated. Mediaeval mystics, especially the chiliastic works of Joachim of Calabria,^[14] were the main subject of his studies. It seemed to Muenzer that the millennium and the Day of Judgment over the degenerated church and the corrupted world, as announced and pictured by that mystic, had come in the form of the Reformation and the general restlessness of his time. He preached in his neighbourhood with great success. In 1520 he went to Zwickau as the first evangelist preacher. There he found one of those dreamy chiliastic sects which continued their existence in many localities, hiding behind an appearance of humility and detachment, the rankly growing opposition of the lower strata of society against existing conditions, and with the growth of agitation, beginning to press to the foreground more boldly and with more endurance. It was the sect of the Anabaptists headed by Nicolas Storch.^[15] The Anabaptists preached the approach of the Day of Judgment and of the millennium; they had “visions, convulsions, and the spirit of prophecy.” They soon came into conflict with the council of Zwickau. Muenzer defended them, though he had never joined them unconditionally, and had rather brought them under his own influence. The council took decisive steps against them, they were compelled to leave the city, and Muenzer departed with them. This was at the end of 1521.»
9. in https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico#La_Scienza_Nuova
10. I have integrated these twin contribution by Croce in my own work as early as the 70s. To understand the crucial importance of the matter, please refer back to my Law of value, reproduction and socialist planning: Methodological introduction, in the Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com .
11.  Bourgeois psychoanalysis, in particular in its exclusivist Freudian form, typically tried to crown itself Sultan in the place of the Sultan. It attempted to do so with its conception of social control exercised through the control of consciousness as conceived by the Jesuits auto-proclaimed soldiers and security services of the Vatican, see Note (3) above. Freud systematically falsified all his medical data in order to legitimate his narratives. This demonstrates that the real objective had nothing to do with the healing and recovery of the patients. In fact, neither Freud nor any other bourgeois psychoanalyst has ever cured anyone; indeed often they made things worse for their patients who were avowedly subjected to « endless » Freudian – or other – analysis, but always having endlessly to pay for it. This narrative-exclusivist aspect explains the battles within bourgeois psychoanalytic schools or chapels, in particular the break between Freud and Jung. This break does simply reflect the break between the unequal exclusivist Nietzschean-rabbinical lodges and the Wagnerian ones with their English variation embodied by Chamberlain.
12. This « hypothesis » of the criminal fire become a quasi but strong circumstantial evidence when it is inserted back into its historical context. It is a pity that no specialist in Joachimite studies has ever raised the obvious question. Unfortunately the question was not raised during the important and relatively recent archeological studies in situ (See Jure Vetere: Ricerche archeologiche nella prima fondazione monastica di Gioacchino da Fiore ( indagini 2001-2005), Rubbettino, 2007.) In effect, the trace of the fire were signaled but there was apparently no attempt to investigate the question further. Later, in 1354, the petty lord of Caccuri devastated the Abbey of San Giovanni in Fiore and burned its library. Fortunately the Florense Order had long started to circulate copies of the major works of its first Abbot and founder. Including north of the Peninsula toward Florence.
13. Buonaiuti, op cité, p 162
14. See the example of the olive and of the light in Buonaiuti, op cité, p 182. The example of light was emblematically used again as a metaphor by G. Bruno.
15. Compared to it La Monadologie of the Rosicrucian Leibniz is a vulgar Masonic reversing work, a method reformulated in its modern form by Leibniz himself. This is soon evident when one uses as a key to Leibniz’ theories the « reversing » of Spinoza’s work. Aside from the natura naturas opposed to the already dubious narrative of biblical creation at the time, Spinoza’s work was deemed to lead to atheism, or rather to a spirituality abstracted from the need of hierarchical intermediaries. The revolutionary master of Spinoza, van den Enden does not deserve to be forgotten. ( https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franciscus_Van_den_Enden ») . For La monadologie – written in French in the original version -, see Febbri editori, 2004.
16. Please refer back to my Methodological introduction already mentioned in the Note 10 above.
17. See Download Now, in the Section Livres-Books of the site www.la-commune-paraclet.com
18. The legend of the republican resistant Brutus remained alive, in particular in the egalitarian Contr’un of La Boëtie. An example of this lasting influence is to be found in Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar.
19. For the Stela of Badessa, see Museo dei Brettii e degli Enottri, guida al percorso espositivo, Città di Cosenza, KSS edizioni, p 79
20. For a useful summary see Giovanni Greco, Patrimonio artistico di San Giovanni in Fiore, Storia e descrizione, Pubblisfera edizioni, 2014.

XXX

MARRIAGE, CIVIL UNIONS AND INSTITUTIONALISATION OF CUSTOMS.

Par les hommes dépités

Par les dieux contrariés

La noce continue

Et vive les mariés!

(G. Brassens)

Table of content

Foreword.

Three initial considerations.

Child adoption and the development of children’s personality.

The legal importance of ceremonial terminology and practices.

Socialisation of the private sphere and institutionalisation of customs:

Legislative prohibition, control measures and empowerment.

Haunting Nietzschean fears: promiscuity, fragmented families and homosexual families.

Two major conceptions:

A ) The father figure, fragmented families and modern households.

B ) Families, households and transmission of values.

Conclusion: Neoliberal specter or solidarity

Foreword.

As early as September 2000, in my essay entitled « Le lit du néo-fascisme » and in its « Annexe » (see the Fascism/Racism/Exclusivism Section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ), I sounded the alarm against the Nietzschean « return » in a new theocratic and multiconfessional guise. This engineered regression is  actively planned within the leading circles of Western and global capitalism. I came back on this crucial subject in 2002 in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme (idem, section Livres-Books), pointing at the same time to the activities of the Manhattan Institute as well as to those of the philo-Semite Nietzschean milieus, both attempting to influence the American presidency.

Today, President G. W. Bush, the same who formulated the preventive war doctrine, pushes the political and social regressive agenda so strongly desired by all sorts of philo-Semite Nietzschean groups. They all dream of a global and openly theocratic Empire centered on the prominence of the Zionist Temple which they want to re-build in Jerusalem. This blind regressive fascination is carried forewords systematically, step by step (see, for instance, the surreptitious attack mounted against republican laicity, the constitutional separation of Church and State being now openly and outrageously considered by them as just another  ideology » during the French debate on the Muslim scarf. For that repugnant manipulation you can refer back to my Book III, in English, in the Livres-Books section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com , using the term « Métis » in the search function.) )

This regression has now become global albeit with the inescapable cultural inflexions needed to avoid a direct confrontation with the still intact democratic and secular beliefs of the majority of the citizenry. This imperial and theocratic counter-reform has already spread beyond European borders. Elsewhere, it already assumes the savagely barbarous and illegal forms of preventives wars and « regime change » with the vain and lunatic hope to establish a « Great Middle East » for the new templars, one that would be compatible with the completion of the colonial building of Eretz Israël, a racist State to be officially declared a « Jewish State » but one which would encompass 90 % of historical Palestine, leaving only a few urban Bantustans to the millions of autochthonous Palestinians.

Despite one’s own thinking, the daily and undeniable facts which link the current Israeli State with this counter-reform, forces us to remain constantly vigilant and critical. At the same time, this critique remains the only guarantee for the survival of the State of Israel in its Onusian border of 1947 (unless new frontiers were negotiated in good faith with the Palestinian people which remains the first historically known occupier of this land.) With the renewal of the liberticidal Patriot Act of the USA and its inexorable extension to the whole planet in the guise of the « anti-terrorist war », this counter-reform aims to transform the entire community of free citizens into Palestinians forced by the Nietzschean « hammer » to a new « voluntary servitude » to use La Boëtie’s apt phrase in his magnificent Contr’un.

Neither the Left nor any person of good will can afford not to develop a simultaneously defensive (public pedagogy, mass mobilisation) and firmly offensive strategy (intellectual and political denunciation and isolation of the philo-Semite Nietzschean crews, because, by definition, philo-Semite Nietzscheanism is antithetical to the Spirit or Mind and to the normal practices inherent to any secular republic worthy of the name.)

Forging ahead with what I began in September 2000 in the context of an induced general culpability more than a naive indifference, I now submit to the Left and critical intellectuals as well as to all communist parties these remarks concerning marriage, civil unions and the institutionalisation of customs. What is presented here are excerpts of a work in progress that was already accessed illegally* even as it was being typed on my personal computer. I therefore decided to publish these excerpts immediately in order to protect the critical spirit of the potential readers, which have a right to form their citizens’ thought on the basis of the original texts instead of rather poorly professional and second-hand chats of petty-bourgeois professional chatters.

Paul De Marco, professor of International Relations.

Richmond Hill, June 2, 2004

*. For instance, this is the proven case – with the dates provided – but not exclusively, for some interviewers and their researchers within Radio Canada and TV Ontario (they will easily recognise themselves.) These are overpaid people who would face some difficulty in trying to explain the basic deontology of a profession for which they are not fit, especially in public channels. That badly educated and trained lumpen-petty-bourgeois endeavor to do anything in order to insure their advancement; this surely pertains to the capitalist nature of the system. Nonetheless, the meddling in private spaces, computers and electronic mails etc, with the aim of lifting materials, regards more directly the Criminal Code. On the other hand, to pretend imitating a Caplan at Canada Post or the Burkean (dis)manors of big or petty « elites », always colonial in this country, does not amount to the best mark of education nor of good taste. Nor of ordinary legality. At such a level of nuisance and mesquinerie, what is called in question is the minimal respect for democracy and perhaps even more that of their personal education, and consequently the cultural heritage and the influence exercised by their pedagogues or at least people paid as such at all levels. As one can see, this explains much. Instead of meddling into the citizens’ private spaces, my advice would be to take your diplomas together with your unisex long-reaching arm on which you ordinarily rely, and look at yourselves in a mirror: You will see, it is very instructive. This stands for all the documents available in your survival Canadiana placed on life-support on public funds while immigrants, usually more qualified professionally and morally, are obliged to labor for a legal 60-hour week for 7.50 CND dollar an hour.

Three initial considerations.

Here are three initial considerations which go to the heart of the problem. They send us back respectively to 1) the present predicament of the Left and the social debate on the World views; 2) the political and ideological importance of terminology given the dominance of the mass-media; 3) the Left and « religious marriage » as such according to the point of view of the body politics or that of civil society.

1 ) The Left never had anything to fear from the so-called societal debates. These debates would not exist without it, nor without its insistence to ground these debates on precise social values such as freedom, equality and fraternity. In other words, these debates should be at the center of the «pragmatism » of the Left. In the last instance, any societal debate deals with the place and role of the individual in the production process and in the social redistribution it supports. This place and this role determine the real degree of liberty conferred by the formal and constitutionalized norms.

This is true for free love and feminism as well as for homosexual union. The Left must strive to keep these debates in their true dimensions. It must therefore exercise the greatest care in underlining the fundamental aspects which connect them to the « universal social services » (social redistribution, households, etc ) and to minority rights such as they derive from the Universal Declaration of Individual and Social Rights.

In a moralizing guise, only in a typically reverse mode, this is precisely what is done by the unbridled activism of a certain Right and of a certain transversal conservatism. They are motivated by the imperatives of the exploitation of Man by Man according to historical epochs, and thus by the internalisation of submissive norms deep inside the individual intimate personality. For them, the pseudo-ethical dramatisation of events, which would otherwise be statistically insignificant, plays the role of a « coercive pedagogy » deemed necessary to preserve the artificial consensus imposed from top down in a domination process well illustrated by Durkheim and Gramsci.

Today the harshness of the debate hides the preventive repressive will of a neoliberal Western capitalism now forced to dismantle to post-war Welfare State in order to increase its profits at the detriment of the whole society despite the secular increase of unemployment. The last thing the Left needs are moral values fit for a « new domesticity » and as such spun widely by the lower-clergies which often owe their situation to the passing of the hat and to pity.

This is increasingly true since the current neoliberal regression is far from having won the game, far from it: In fact, a restructuration is imposed on the labor force to make it compatible with the « self-sufficient » society described by John Galbraith; paradoxically, this forceful dualisation does create conditions highly propiscious to the public and social solidarity between the middle classes, perennially in peril, and the industrial and precarious workers. At least as long as long as the Left will not lose sight of the crucial importance of the universally accessible social services. These are necessary to re-equilibrate the increasing divergence between the « individual salary » and the « global net revenue » of the household – individual salary plus « deferred salary », namely pensions and UI etc, plus the transfers to the households in the form of universal access to public social safety nets and infrastructures.

The « global net revenue » of the household is the macro-economic key needed to support a buoyant micro-economic productivity. It defines the competitiveness of the Social Formation. It is not a hazard if the regressive attempt to rehabilitate the « nuclear family » with its patriarchal power relationships does correspond to the increasing incapacity of contemporary capitalism to re-absorb the manpower « liberated » en masse by increasing capitalist productivity and by the transition to a services society. What is more this is done without the mediation of the sharing of the socially available work among all citizens apt to work.

The Nietzschean fear mongering fantasies over adoption by homosexual couples are but the perverted symptom of a planned attack directed against the mechanisms of solidarity implemented within the « households ». This is verified as much by family allocations as by other social safety nets. In all these debates the role of the Left should be to support the material autonomy of the individual, independently of their sexual orientation, by way of the defense of the mechanisms of social solidarity adapted to real budgetary margins, as well as the defense of the demands emerging from its social redistribution political ideal. With one’s feet firmly on the ground, let us not forget that the Nietzschean alternative to the liberalisation of customs and the legislation of equal forms of homosexual civil unions is nothing other than the « return » of organised prostitutions in new « maisons closes » – this being the obliged reverse of traditional marriage – set up in the image of their ideal society. This has been already announced by the assiduous readers of Carl Schmitt and Co as well as of some other calamitous and venal pen-pushers.

2 ) A terminological vigilance must be exercised by all progressive parties and pressure groups since the dynamic of public debates is strongly skewed in a society dominated by the mass-media firmly in the hands of private interests. I would thus avoid the term « marriage » because it is charged with too many connotations. It should simply be cancelled from the Civil Code or Common law in favor of the more generic and neutral terms « civil union ». Such civil union is compatible with gender difference according to the type of contract voluntarily chosen by the couples and underwritten by the law.

By specifying the respective patrimonial and others rights and duties of the parties in case of divorce or rupture, these contracts form the necessary basis for legal and economic stability. On it are then grafted all the other redistribution mechanisms. This basis is the only one to which the Republic does recognise a constraining legal force within the democratic limitations inherent to any freely entered contract. This is in general the wise direction chosen by the Pacs legislation in France, despite its prudence. It is clear, however, that in the common parlance, we will continue for some time to speak of « marriage » instead of « civil union ».  The opponents of the liberalisation of customs will do their best to voluntarily confuse one for the other. Thus the Left should strive to instinctively and perennially explain what is really at stake for the whole community. The issue is the civil contract and its forms, not the « religious marriage » which remains a matter of personal facultative choice exercised in the private domain, a choice which does not concern us politically speaking.

Nothing forbids that the first be designated as « civil marriage » in ordinary speech since this is not totally inexact and does correspond to a well established social habit. Similarly nothing forbids that free couples continue to be formed without relying on contracts. As far as civil unions and marriages are concerned, it is useful to recall that the secular logic (laicity) rests on assuring the rights and stability of the majority, while scrupulously protecting the rights of the minorities. The Nietzschean fantasies destined by superior casts to the supposed « common people » are nightmares from the past. And will remain so at least as long as citizens will have free access to public education. (For instance, the necessary social over-determinations, which need to be accumulated to produce the so-called « spontaneous actions » described by André Gide, should not be neglected, no more than the furtive looks exchanged with his wife by this anti-totalitarian – anti-Soviet? – author in a Maghrebean train.)

3 ) Should then the Left avoid developing its own ideas on the « religious marriages » as such? The anti-clerical tradition derived from a sheer political necessity in the epochs in which the Church hierarchies were still exercising important political and social powers. The enshrining of the separation of Church and State in the Constitution resolved this problem from the political point of view and equally, although in a smaller measure, from the social point of view. Today, even in Poland, the practicing believers, as opposed to the variegated groups of « believers », amount to less than 5 % of the whole population. This explains the otherwise contradictory importance attached by a relevant part of the population, the homosexual population included, to these private and religiously characterised ceremonies: This demonstrates a willingness to have one’s own social « normalcy » recognised more than a willingness to struggle for the « aggiornamento » of the concerned confessions.

We are dealing here with a Gordian knot made of three distinct ropes. The first concerns the Churches as private theocratic institutions. The second concerns the private religious beliefs. The third concerns social and republican « normalcy » and thus, in great part, the question of sexual orientation – and the idea which society entertains with respect to sexual reproduction at any given time in History.

The logical and philosophical imperative, perfectly illustrated in Plato’s Republic, does create a peculiar dialectic between the priest and the believer.  Individual socio-political reasons not being necessarily shared by everyone, the equilibrium can only be achieved by the degree of autonomy which the theocratic-social structures are ready to recognise to individual consciousness. Obviously, this represents the main tendency. It is exhibited, for instance,  by the history of Christian evolution albeit the dialectic processes at play remain the same for all established religions. The republican spirit had definitively solved the question. It did this by recognising the political and legal rights for each individual consciousness to free itself definitively from this truncated religious dialectic, which does not recognise the legitimacy for a free consciousness to be responsible for one’s beliefs – including atheistic beliefs – or for one’s own doubts, outside of any clerical meddling. The Republic does not live on the basis of a primitive and synthetic thought, although it can coexist with it, tolerating it.

Clearly, the Left has historically privileged the march to the emancipation of individual consciousness. For it, republican « normalcy » potentially generalised to the whole citizenry, did rest on the simultaneous emancipation from the ceremonial atavism inherited from the past. In the beginning – in France – it went through the unfortunate experience of substituting new ceremonies to the older ones. It thus went against its own secular soul. This substitution amounted to the tragic confusion between social relationships of production and freedom of consciousness. It was partially explained with the necessity to do away with the socio-political influence of church hierarchies. Later, the anti-clerical ideology and propaganda continued trying to accomplish what the official Cult of the Supreme Being was unable to accomplish. (That official cult used a 10 days week which had the unfortunate consequences of eliminating the many religious holydays that benefited the hard-pressed peasantry, the great majority of the citizens at the time.) But his time, this was done in a more lucid and logical manner. The external control of customs was transformed into republican matters to be duly legalised, and as such the Civil Code did contribute in freeing society from the most archaic limitations of the Ancient Regime. The rest unfolded from the development of the socialisation of the social relationships of production.

Consequently, it would be counter-productive in the eyes of individual and collective liberties to pretend to rehabilitate the institution of religious marriage by conferring to it an usurped importance with regard to the political and social evolution as well as with regard to the evolution of each particular consciousness. This rehabilitation would mix up the cards because it would confer the character of a collective norm to religious ceremonies when these pertain to the reproduction of the labor power within the household. The « normalcy » which would derive from it would be a « normalisation » through repression rather than a liberating normalisation by way of secular and republican norms. Yet, without these norms no one would be able to chose freely his/her own objectives and the way to reach them, while enjoying the benefit of all the rights and duties collectively recognised in the name of equality and liberty. The religious normalisation is the opposite of the secular republican normalcy – a specifically « human » normalcy, taking into account the historical becoming of Man. This is because it is incapable to conceive liberty otherwise than outside of the imposed institutional constraints which usurp their temporal power as much as their spiritual pseudo-perennity. The latter narrative pertains of the a-temporal « divine » sphere.

Politically speaking the Left must keep clear from religious ceremonies linked to private marriage. However, it must defend the primacy and the equality of civil unions legally instituted without discrimination related to sexual orientation. From the point of view of civil society and of groups from the Left that are connected to it, it is possible and probably wise for the Left to play a particular role, above all when the activism of the theocratic neoconservative pressure groups has the potential to overlap on the republican political agenda.

Be it as it may, the Left remains tributary to its pedagogic and secular role since it has the obligation to help society as a whole in its march toward the increasing internalisation of the principles of equality, freedom and fraternity. And it needs to do this without accelerating to the point of hurting the beliefs of a part of the population if not a part of its potential electorate. Clearly in the optic of the dialogue with the religious world, its tendency will be to defend the freedom of individual consciousness beyond the ecclesiastic mediations. It would thus argument in favor of an « aggiornamento », if not in favor of a « theology of liberation » in the image of what the Sandinists and their allies had been able to do. This implies a qualitative defense of religious principles which sends one back to a common Humanist and « rational » foundation. (Added note Feb 2017: On the importance of the Tetramorph for the history of religions and in particular of Christian religions, see the essay on Joachim of Fiore provided here.)

However, it will not try to impose to this religious world any restrictions which would go beyond its republican authority. In as much as the republican and secular principles are scrupulously preserved, it is then preferable to leave historical becoming go through its decantation process. The Republic will consequently recognise the right of the most orthodox and of the most conservatives groups to progress at their own chosen speed within their own institutions as long as these will not pretend, as is unfortunately often the case today, to overlap from the private to the public sphere. To be blunt, by way of an example, the parties on the Left will not participate in the struggle for the advancement of the Vatican II Agenda, although they will take all necessary measures to ensure that both Left and Right pressure groups will be able to freely debate the issues within civil society.

Neither would they be concerned if homosexual or mixed groups had the intention to provoke another great schism within the Catholic Church in order to allow the civil and private marriages, homo or heterosexual, of priests, as well as the end of celibacy or of the gender discrimination for priesthood, and indeed for the papacy itself. Indeed, it seems that the historical evolution of all established religions oscillated between schism and reconciliation each time the « aggionamenti » do not prove deep enough with respect to the general evolution of society. This evolution then leads to a new and qualitatively superior institutional and relational equilibrium – ecumenical dialogue – as soon as the fury of the initial struggles are appeased.

This is the case for all three monotheist religions. The Protestant churches are by nature less attached to a doctrinal unity maintained forcefully by superior hierarchies, a trait which permits them local innovations otherwise inconceivable, although these are won at the cost of similar difficulties. As far as it is concerned, the Anglican Church seems more propense to an institutionalised federative ecumenism, although it remains to be seen whether this road will be judged more compatible with the integration on the par with the Churches which openly welcome the homosexuals or traditionally illegitimate but distinct religious practices. Although the most archaic institutions would deserve being shaken up and opened up to the influence of the communities without which the « ecclesia » have no real human sense, it remains that the most « orthodox » religions and the most conservative ones retain the right to practice their own cult in the private sphere without having necessarily to be undermined from outside, at least as long as they refrain from acting as « sects » that constrain the free adhesion of their membership and thus the material and psychological integrity of their libre arbitre.

As was recently said, the institutionalisation of customs does not necessarily means their liberalisation. No more than it necessarily implies a republican legislation. What is important here is to keep clearly in mind the level which is at issue, public or private. Conversely, any timidity in the legislation and institutionalisation of the republican emancipatory measures will impede the qualitative advances to be made in both spheres. It equally will impede the adoption of the most efficient strategy and class alliances needed to preserve the republican conquests while pushing for the greatest possible general emancipation. In the end, this remains the political and social vocation of any political party or pressure group which belongs to the progressive side of the political specter. As we can see, more than ever the Republic must play its educational role and insist on the liberty and equality of all citizens, both on the individual and collective plane.

The historical becoming of the Human species and the principle of precaution.

The Human species as a species was born from the subtle Overall dialectics which conjugates the dialectics of Nature with the dialectics of History. (On the three forms of dialectics see the Methodological introduction available here.) Thanks to this Overall dialectics, the Human species does for ever rest on the « chance » inherent to sexual reproduction (see Albert Jacquard on the Ethical and biological signification of this miraculous lottery). As a species originating out of Nature, it is not confined to the blind determinism of the so-called « immutable » laws of Nature. Nonetheless, it remains a particular species. It could be true to its destiny which is characterised by its liberty and its autonomy if it were going against its natural subtract. The same goes with the « brain », a physical organ different from « thought » or Mind although it will continue to be its necessary base, even in the eventuality external or internal prostheses would be used to multiply its potency and, in a more arduous fashion, its polymorphic efficiency. (Cyborgs and Blue Machines always rest on Human intelligence as Douglas Hofstadter concluded  in accord with the Marxists who however do not look down on tools at least when these are not aimed at transforming Man into « ants » like in the Simon’s model developed in the higher floors of the MIT closely linked to the military-industrial complex.)

The becoming of Man cannot be detected in any Golem whatsoever, whatever its inspiration. Today, the ordinary scientists have some difficulties distinguishing gene and proteins without speaking of the alleles and their interactions with enzymes, hence with the environment. The most advanced scientists ignore what pertains to Lamarck and Darwin respectively although they are inclined to think that the history of the Human cells and the logic of mutations do rest an intimate dialectics of both – Just think about the short, medium and long term memory of the blood-based immune system. This memory sometimes transforms itself into an acquired genetic base and sometimes not. This remark was proposed here for the first time.)

It should thus be clear that the adepts of the genetic revolution who dream to fabricate « overmen » are but Diafoirus doctors – including James Watson, who shines through his collection of information, historically dated with some kind of Darwinian method but far removed from the idea generally entertained about what makes a gentleman, excluding of course James Bond and its warring ideology.)

The question does not seem to be one of missing knowledge: I believe that we are reaching here the physical limits of the species as a species and thus as a given « scientific universe », so that induction can fill the lacunae of deduction with enough certainty, though not with total certainty. This explains why the best and more conscientious Scientifics – say, Testart and Jacquard – are ringing the alarm bell with insistence in their quality of citizens. In effect, on the basis of what is known and even of what is already vulgarized, we can affirm that artificially induced genetic modifications of the Human species, do interfere with the whole heritage not only Human but more largely cellular, namely the characteristics acquired by life on the Planet. They thus interfere with the law of hazard which presides over the destiny of the Human species and which form the basis of its freedom in the historical sphere, and more precisely that of thought and institutions.

Here, the precautionary principle demand a world-wide rigor. This in no way implies the end of research in certain fields but instead its submission to very strict protocols and their careful confinement. We know too little to play the sorcerer-apprentice or to permit that the destiny of our species be played on the neoliberal speculative casino. In effect, it is possible that we will know too little for too long to pretend to lift the restrictions derived from the precautionary principle.

In some case, the question is to help people affected by ailments who otherwise would be left without care. This is a limit case which imposes a prudent equilibrium between social solidarity and the duties towards our species. In this precise case, one would enquire about the level of tolerance and prevention compatible with the precautionary principle. In general, this would first entail the control and tracking of what is implemented after the proper examination of the question by a pluridisciplinary panel. Second, the determination of the recessive or non-recessive characters thus artificially introduced, as well as of the induced effects which can be simulated beforehand according to the non-intentional risks of propagation. Finally, each time a relatively small but statistically non negligent group of citizens will pressure to have access to these types of new therapies, there should be an European and preferably world-wide obligation to finance new promising scientific research in areas that would have the potential to suppress the induced collateral effects which would have been deemed acceptable only because they would belong to contained dispersion fields which would retain the potential to be eliminated.

In such a fashion, the short and long term scientific innovation process will be sustained as long as the financing of alternative research be secured every time the precautionary principle imposes obstacles that are scientifically impossible to lift. Let us imagine however that some Nations do not entertain the same scruples. This would not necessarily amount to an economic disadvantage because the laws relative to the precautionary principle would apply for the national or supranational market to all the products concerned by it. However, with regard with what was stated above relatively to the eventual heritage of characters artificially introduced or induced following it, particularly for non-recessive characters, it is clear that the States will necessarily have to widen the scope of their precautionary principle to immigration and even more as far as the existing proscription rules of procreation are concerned. This would become a necessity but would not necessarily turn into a nightmare as some would pretend, at least for those countries attached to the preservation of the integrity of the Human species. In effect, such mechanisms are already and customarily implemented in all societies (prohibition of incest, consanguinity etc.) Even less dramatic, the availability of preventive therapeutic abortion would certainly acquire a greater role. In the end, its logic would remain unchanged except that the State would grant itself the right to impose it when it is unable to control the foreseeable effects of such pregnancies. Be it as it may, this problematic now deserves to be taken seriously but serenely.

Child adoption and the development of their personality.

On these foundations it is apparent that the problems caused by artificial procreation by definition can never be entirely abstracted from the basic fact (« initial situation ») which determines our species as a species based on sexual reproduction. Even were parthenogenesis possible, it would nonetheless be dependant from the initial conditions. With few exceptions it would in any case be largely put aside due to the logic attached to the precautionary principle discussed above, although it does not manifest per se the perils inherent in the kind of genetic engineering that transgresses the barrier of species. However, raising these problems as working hypotheses, it soon appears that such development would lead to an evolution of the historical conceptions linked to maternity (which beneficent in the eyes of some feminists who privilege the dialectics of Nature, but mutilating and potentially de-empowering for those who argue on the plane of History and who therefore make of maternity a strict individual choice for women.)

This debate will continue. However, given the context, it seems to me that the child adoption – by traditional, atypical or homosexual households – does present less problems for the preservation of the foundations of the dialectics of Nature, than many « promises » hastily derived from the on-going genetic revolution. The dialectics of Nature is inherent to the Human species given that its precious preservation now « paradoxically » appears as the sine qua non condition for its Historical development as a species whose vocation is both individual and collective equality and freedom. On the other hand, the « promises » of genetics are too often confused or at least ill-defined and far-away. They are churned out by all these sorcerers-apprentices who fancy that they have acquired as much real intelligence as is induced by the recent rapidity with which the mechanical Taylorist sequencing of genes proceeds. (In effect, based on factual evidence, this is a « binary » velocity-based « intelligence » for which exactitude vacillates from many thousands to 80 000 and later 30 000 genes, more or less …)

Everything will depend on what society will decide with respect to the conditions in which maternity and fatherhood are exercised: This is the most fundamental aspect. As a matter of fact, far from being eliminated, including among the wealthier classes, this problem has the potential to return with a vengeance – just think here about the vulgar pedagogical ineptitudes proffered in this field by a Watson et al. Especially as the memorization of the IQ or other tests, already learned in their essential patterns inside the family, does facilitate the enrolment into classist schools and even the obtainment of Nobel Prizes. This happens without in the least guaranteeing the comprehension of the phenomena, especially when the givens of a problem do change organically, which in the end is exactly what characterises the plasticity of Human intelligence (see for instance, the instructive if unfortunate experience of Black, Derman, Scholes in the economic field, and of course, that of Watson himself, among many others.)

Knowledge and science are ontologically antithetical to fanatism and to religious or templar obscurantism. They are the concrete negation of (Zarathustrean) Authority such as defined by a Nietzsche who dreamed to transform science into an activity brutally over-determined by the imperative of survival and that of the privileges of the dominating classes. In any case, these are always subjected to an unavoidable over-coming due to the development of the productive forces and even more radically by that of the socio-political production and reproduction relationships, not to speak of the « ineluctability » of Spenglerian cycles, namely « birth, development and decadence ».

Some can obviously dream to literally over-come the Human species. As long  as they will not be able to scientifically demonstrate to us that these over-comings are compatible with the preservation of the dialectics of Nature, its heritage and the freedom of Human becoming it encompasses, society will be obliged to treat them as sorcerers-apprentices and thus to subject them to a rigorous control in order to limit the potential consequences in time and space.

Above all, it should restore the clearest knowledge and consciousness to the majority of citizens to insure that they will act on the basis of established facts doing away with atavistic fears and superfluous fantasies (This is because nowadays the followers of Faust have a poor knowledge of the Classics; they are reduced to study them in our universities with various Bloom and with many surnumerary pitiable voyeurs à la George Steiner et al. They are therefore ill-prepared intellectually despite the grotesquely high tuition fees demanded from the students. They do not even possess the Faustian inkpot, being glued to the cathodic screens of their TV, PC and other such gadgets; nor do they have the reflex necessary to any Ethical consciousness because they tried to smooth and reverse it with a characteristically grotesque Nietzschean snobbism – beyond good and evil -, often calculating but always obscene. Some still dream of a temple made of stones and resting, as happened during the worse cases in Antiquity, on mass-graves consciously prepared albeit with a confused and blind consciousness.)

This essential restoration of critical sense is already happening thanks to the best scientists in the concerned so-called hard disciplines. They deserve to be listen too by all of us, if only because the best among them, such as Testart and Jacquard, call us to exercise our critical duty as citizens. A duty which must be discharged with humility given our unavoidable individual limitations. This is why I underlined above what seems to me to be the heart of the matter, namely the precautionary principle.

Keeping well in mind the spirit of equality and liberty irrevocably attached to individuals and societies, the problematic of the various kind of unions which interests us here, does demonstrate how useful it can be in order to avoid possible regressions. These are regressions which in practice present more potential damage to the classes least prepared to get a grip on them and who would therefore be condemned to live with them on the basis of fantasies often consciously maintained by the Nietzscheans who pretend to be « enlightened ».

Each one of us has the potential to emerge as a militant of freedom and equality, that is to say as a citizen. This is exactly the opposite of the role of « nihilist militant » assigned by proven « pitres ». In its humility, this citizens’ militancy is urgent because of the complexity of the issues and because the current nature of the debates, as well as the knowledge on which they are based, are mastered by none – neither individuals nor groups – notwithstanding what various merchants would like to pretend. The collective, honest, serene and critical discussion is the only acceptable way to confront these issues. The after-thoughts eventually detected will have to be implacably denounced for the good of all concerned.

Far from willing to succumb to a guilty laxity, it is necessary to recall the scientifically grounded denunciation of exclusivism. Suffice here to recall that the Nazis, who were also extremely Nietzschean although openly anti-Semite, tried to liquidate the homosexuals. In a sense, their racist fantasies of recessive avatars of the very idea of dominant casts, were to the point: The problem they raised for society and its Historical becoming are of a strictly identical order though different from that raised by the Roms. The second are a concrete negation of the fraudulent concept of race, based on territorial borders. The first forces us to raise the question of the Overall dialectics, irresolvable in its principle, which unites the dialectics of Nature and the dialectics of History of a species based on sexual reproduction, whatever the more or less far-removed forms this last can assume. (On the three forms of dialectics see the Methodological introduction available here.)

Human becoming in the context of equality and liberty remains the Guiding Star in both terrestrial hemispheres. Any reader of the Logic or of the Phenomenology of Hegel knows that some homosexual « groups » will become advocates of the least controlled procreation methods. These will be but very small minorities, which will be calculatedly fed by the current Nietzscheism with the objective of furthering its own cause in confusing the issues. The illustration of such truncated dialectics are many. Lately we saw many members of the Western Christian « elites » with their Arab colleagues convert themselves to the philo-Semite Nietzschean necessity to destroy Haram al-Sharif, third sacred Muslim location situated in East Jerusalem. They want to do this in order to re-build an illegitimate temple of stone on a ground which no one should be able to step upon – unless one would pretend to genetically resuscitate the first Great Priests of Israel, this new and pathetic Holy Grail of religious and genetetician primitive consciousness? ( Added note Feb 2017: Please note that there are no archeological evidence what so ever for the legendary Salomon Temple; on the other hand, we all know or should know that the Genesis was copied from older Sumerian texts as well as other biblical narratives; the figure of Moses itself takes much from the Legend of Sargon, and so on and so forth…)

We all will have to remain vigilant and intellectually and politically mobilised, including homosexual groups, during the whole process which leads to the redaction, the presentation, legislation and implementation of the new republican laws dealing with homosexual civil unions. A new and vulgar Alain Bauer would be insufferable in this domain. Although this time around he would run an enormous risk by trying to meddle even through proxies. This is because contrary to the French Muslims, a still largely excluded and poorly  represented group despite its demographic weight, he would here be faced with groups that are well structured, transversal and furthermore groups that know their André Gide as well as their Karl Marx without ignoring the original Nietzsche and Wagner and their followers from yesterday as well as unfortunately those still around today.

The homosexual union is thus a union between full members of the Human species. This union inscribes itself in the logic of the sexual reproduction of the Human species such as it pertains to the dialectics of Nature (procreation ) which can eventually be assisted socially and as it pertains to the Historical reproduction of Human beings as beings capable to take charge of their own historical and ethical becoming. The types of union that concur to these primordial and intimately linked ends and which would deserve to be backed up by the Left and by all the people who believe in equality and liberty, should logically be those which favor the most the individual and collective emancipation. A traditional or modern and alternative couple has no need to participate by itself in the procreation of children in order to play a positive role in the sexual reproduction of the species. This truth goes back as far as the origin of the species itself by means of adoption. Today they are added new alternatives offered by science, in particular those which remain compatible with the integrity of the Human species as a species. In the end, what is essential is the historical becoming of Human beings as beings endowed with an autonomous consciousness and thus capable to exercise an individual and collective responsibility. That is to say beings promised to equality and liberty despite more or less dangerous, though temporary, regressions.

The legal importance of ceremonial terminology and practices

It is important to take into account from the very beginning one of the republican conquest more intimately tied to the creation, preservation and perpetuation of the republican spirit and practice, namely the subjecting of « conjugal » union between two free citizens to the most determining republican sanction, that is to say the civil union. Semantics plays here a vital role because it helps avoid the stumbling blocks embodied in the moralistic regressions which occult the initial Human emancipation project. Both expressions « civil marriage » or « civil unions » point to exactly identical legal realities.

However, the problems linked to comprehension, often consciously nurtured, derive from a longue association of the term « marriage » with the religious domain, notwithstanding the religion and the behavioral codes it entails. This confusion is anti-secular – anti-laic – and anti-republican in its very essence. It confuses the political domain and the juridical rules which are necessarily common with the private domain, and the private and facultative ceremonies and rituals which a group of persons or another can freely chose to follow without importuning one’s neighbor.

The relatively recent progresses of authentically democratic forms of thought and practices, namely those which privilege the greatest possible Human emancipation, raised the necessity to codify various types of civil unions. While specifying the responsibility of each party, these new and juridically sanctioned forms grant to each individual, hence to each citizen responsible for him/herself, all latitude to chose freely. This means that individuals who desire to establish a conjugal union must legally do so by choosing the form of civil union which they prefer among those deemed compatible with Human emancipation by the Republic.

The Pacs constitutes a democratic opening as far as these new civil unions are concerned. However, it prudently remains below the Overall dialectics of the sexual reproduction of the species – or its substitutes that always lead to the physical reproduction of the species – and the historical becoming of a species destined for equality and liberty. An crucial step remains. However, as we briefly mentioned, the social, political and ethical stakes are such that we will inevitably be faced with rear-guard struggles from the most reactionary epigones of the established order. Nowadays these are born again in the guise of philo-Semite Nietzscheans. They always tend to openly praise the « surrendered wife ». They do not accept the insistence to clearly distinguish between civil unions and religious marriage, because they rightly sense here the imminent historical defeat of their conception of the social and physical hierarchies between beings and classes. Their refusal to distinguish between religious marriage and civil unions show a strong disregard for the evidence according to which the type of civil union made obligatory does not in the least interfere with the possibility to add to it the form of private marriage which they would desire to associate to it in a facultative manner.

Their desire to restore the religious concept of marriage, at least in its reliquat of the union between two individuals of different gender, simply reveal their fear of the liberating influence of the legal supremacy of republican civil union over private marriage. Witness the evolution of the problematic of divorce as well as that of child custody which more and more depend of social factors not simply linked to the traditional perception of parental roles.

Since freedom spaces conquered in a domain tend to overlap on adjacent domains, the legislation of new types of civil unions between two free citizens, without gender discrimination, would amount, at least in part, to act uphill from the now common divorce practices between traditional couples since no one would dream to question them any longer at least among republican forces. This legislation would be a supplementary mediation on the road to the expression of « free love » so dear to the Communards and to the Marxists. The customs and their institutionalisation constitute the ultimate stake in the competition between modes of production and social organisations and, consequently, of Human emancipation.

Socialisation of the private sphere and institutionalisation of customs:

Legislative prohibition, control measures and empowerment

The socialisation of the private sphere is as inexorable as the bureaucratisation of the political sphere analysed by Max Weber as a social « rationalisation » phenomenon. This is true for the household tasks, the old « economy » of the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient in general, who did not ignore its vital importance. Today some rightly insist on the « dessous de l’écomonie domestique » or the hidden side of the domestic economy. For instance Louise Vandelac. This does contribute silently the equivalent of close to ¼ or 1/3 of the GDP.

However this is equally true of the behavior inside the « private » sphere thus socialised, to wit the basic rules of the socialisation of individuals in the primordial social unit that corresponds to the reproduction of labor power and of personalities. Thus any « private » space is in reality a form of political space, economically and socially organised according to supplementary mediations. (Refer her to the schema summarized at the end of my « Anti-Varela » in the Section « For socialism, for Cuba » available in www.la-commune-paraclet.com .)

It remains however that the technological advances, in particular the all-round intrusive surveillance, pull the private space into the public sphere. It does this with the added risk to drag with it the intimate sphere of consciousness and of personality, which is potentially devastating without an adequate democratic control. In other words, up until now, the institutionalisation of customs generally speaking only served to sanction a specific socio-economic order thanks to the regulation and stabilisation of the inter-relationships between households and Enlarged Reproduction (or dynamic general equilibrium). Nowadays, its task is to create the legal bases not so much of a predefined order, but rather of the material and institutional basis which allows citizens to perseverate in their liberty – both intimate, social and political.

Up until now the law forbade and regulated. Now it can and should engender freedom conceiving regulation as the minimum limits necessary to insure that the liberty of any one does not infringe on the liberty of any other. This is even truer for the customs which concern Human becoming. They either suppose the development of free and responsible personalities or, failing that, they strongly risk being corrupt in their freedom potential due to technological evolutions – even when this is abstracted from all regressive political evolution. This is because this evolution now symbolised by nanotechnologies are potentially more intrusive than anything know so far. The liberalisation of customs has always been the principal nexus of the equality of beings and thus of the authenticity of personalities and of democracy. This earns it a dangerous Nietzschean aggressiveness although this fatally represents nothing but a rear-guard brought in its own retrenchment by the necessity of its own historical overcoming.

Their remains to lift a paradox that only exist in its appearances: To legislate in the case of the Muslim veil amounted to a restriction of liberties, however it is the opposite for the legislation that concerns the civil union – thus inducing the lawful parity for the homosexual union contracts. This would seem to flow logically: The legal prohibition of trivial behavior, such as vestimentary prohibition in the case of the veil, does represent a clear restriction of liberties and a injury to good sense – Indeed the manipulation of a Bauer was needed to led to such absurdities.

In effect, the existing laws relative to laicity – the secular State – were amply sufficient to accomplish an French-style integration of the French Muslims. But to accomplish this the Republic had to do a minimum of efforts to bring this community on a par with the other religious communities – for instance as concerned the confessional resources available for an appeased practice of laicity. Parity should also have been the objective in the other domains which concern republican mobility, in particular for child, women and citizens protection and their effective integration at all levels be they economic, social, cultural or political thanks to an authentic anti-discrimination republican policy.

It remains that in the case of homosexual marriages and their consequences, the law is simply lacking and this absence in itself does constitute an anti-republican prohibition. A legal empowering framework capable to define the parameters for available choices for all citizens without infringing on the rights of others, has become an obligation as far as Human rights are concerned as well as the taking into account of the underlying socio-economic and cultural realities. Should one recall that it was only thorough legal empowerment that the most traditional citizens will finally be confronted to their own beliefs? In effect, as laicity demands, after having chosen their preferred type of civil union, which alone defines their civil status in the eyes of the Republic and thus their lawful responsibilities, they will remain perfectly free to contract the private « marriage » desired with their religious or other kind of ceremonies and rituals. In fact, they are free to submit to the induced constraints as long as they will freely consent to do so, irrespective of what the religious text says. The civil unions which will have to include the non-traditional unions are compatible with any form of private union or marriage. The opposite is not true. This evidence indicates the legal Republican duty in the matter.

For the Republic, duty equally implies right. In this domain, the issues are the diverse measures of social solidarity and of family support. Obviously, the Social or neoliberal State is entirely free to decide on the level of redistribution, so long as it can count on a parliamentary majority backed by a citizen consensus, and as long as it does not go against existing judicial and constitutional – charter of rights, etc. Yet at no time can it impose, without betraying its own nature, a discrimination between types of unions which citizens should be able to chose freely without prejudices. At most, after an ample consultation of the interested groups, the State can adopt prevention as well as supplementary support measures as far as the implementation of the new forms of unions are concerned, in particular with regard to child adoption.

This will be welcomed by the groups concerned. In this way, not only will they finally acquire the data bases necessary to desinflate too many Nietzschean and religious hot air balloons, but also, at least during the initial phases, these data bases will permit the republican regulation of a new social phenomenon, while undermining preventively the arguments of the acting minorities within the most traditional groups. In effect, due to their lack of comprehension of laicity, liberty and equality, these groups are slave to the respect and deference due to – according to Samuel Huntington – « Authority » – i.e. the temple(s). In so doing, they too rapidly forget that the only legitimate authority which imposes itself without exception is that of the Republic itself, because it emanates from the legitimacy conferred by the people, as the sovereign subject, or else that derived from the scientific method.

It is not useful to speak of gay « marriage » since the order of things that concern the Church do not concern us at the republican level. It is not the role of the Republic to support or judge the gay communities in their relations with a Church which tends to be exclusivist and patriarchal by nature. In rigorous terms, politically speaking these relationships do not concern us. We should rather be concerned with the responsibilities of the Republic and thus with the homosexual civil unions and civil contracts compatible with the existing Individual and Social Human Rights. Without naturally excluding the possibility of free unions engaged into without any form whatsoever of institutionalisation.

A great rigor is necessary with what concern this institutional distinction. Here resides one of the most sensible nerve of what potentially is a false debate, thus one highly prone to Nietzschean manipulations, and as such counterproductive for the Left. As long as the Left will be able to publicly make such a distinction, it will appear as the only authentic supporter of the rights of all citizens, be they laic or religious, against all the exclusivist tendencies so poisonous for the entire society. If it is at all necessary, let us recall that the rate of attendance to church and other religious places is very low in France as well as in all other Western nations, ex-East bloc included. This proves the great and unshakable attachment of the greatest part of the citizens to the secular State-form, whatever their religious personal convictions, be they religious, agnostic or atheistic.

 Haunting Nietzschean fears: promiscuity, fragmented families and homosexual families

We said in the essay « Le lit du néo-fascisme » – section Fascism/Racism/Exclusivism of this same site – that the issue of pedophilia is highly dramatised by the « Freudo-Nietzschean » cliques, if you grant me the use of this redundant expression. The real-problem is statistically small in the society in general and this is even more the case in a society that has a good conception of puberty and of the legal majority which grants a full citizen statute. In effect, while the attempts are made to foster culpability in view of un-acknowledgeable political ends, one tends to forget to institute the preventive social structures as well as those necessary for treatment and rehabilitation.

Be it as it may, the issue of child adoption by homosexual couples or households risk to agitate many irrational fears. This is because, in the imagination of most people, it is attached to the « universal » prohibition of incest – corrupted by Freud and re-introduced in the problematique of parental structures by Lévi-Strauss and in the problematique of the « social circulation of women » according to Pierre-Philippe Rey. I have already elaborated on the subject in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme – section Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ).

Let us emphasis here that nothing worthwhile will come out of the perpetuation of the forged ineptitudes of Freud on this subject albeit its primordial importance. Going straight to the point for what concerns us here, let us simply note that today the subject is inextricably linked to the documented problem of « promiscuity » within modern families, although, at least in the West, we do not have clear-cut information, aside from the literature on the various forms of enlarged families. The comparing is done with the data pertaining to the nuclear bourgeois family but filtered by the environmentally-colored mentalities, especially as far as the problem of authority is concerned.

The most conformist groups, rigorous fighters for a mythical harmonious family life, exhibit the same prejudices towards fragmented families and divorce as they do towards homosexual issues. In other words, there is a lot of empty talk. One must backtrack to what is known: On the one hand, contemporary and observed promiscuity – a phenomenon not to be confused with pedophilia but which has a real foundation in the dialectics of Nature in as much as one corrects Freud on the fundamentals on the basis of scientific data, notably anthropological and ethnological data – and the relationship with parental authority exercised directly or indirectly as demonstrated by Malinowski and Margaret Mead.

In effect we can already see that existing traditional practices are not entirely compatible with the freedom of Human beings since they correspond to a patriarchal and authority-based society. The contemporary behaviors which emerge from fragmented non-gay families impose to define the direction we want to take. It just happens that by resolving the question for the traditional fragmented families we will have, almost magically, progressed towards the resolution of the « problems » raised with such fright with regard to the promiscuity risk within homosexual couples and households. Here too, what is at issue are the preventive and support structures which society is able to implement with the necessary resources. This has nothing to do with the old irrational fears and much more to do with the progression toward a freer world, more inclined towards fraternity and sisterhood.

The issue of authority cannot only be comprehended as a psychological question abstracted from any historical comprehension. This is because we want to reach an individual and collective authority equally shared by the whole society, a power exercised collectively – democratically in the « communist » sense of the word. To summarise, let us recall the terms of the debate that needs to be added to the critique of Freud and of Mead. First one must consider the societies based on status – à la Max Weber; they are founded on the power of individuals – charismatic … or presented as such by a calculating cast ideology which always sends one back to primitive modes of domination that could be qualified as « brahamanic » to simply while remaining modern. One must also take into account the « cold » emancipation from these archaic social structures which are induced by the dissolving effects of capitalism and by it destructive logic based on the substitution of use value with exchange value, and that of any use value by this dual merchant and capitalist form.

In the end though one must keep in mind the possibility of the social recomposition at the communist stage or, if one prefers, in the truly realised democratic society, one which would have learned to conciliate concretely freedom and equality. Here the factice dichotomy between use value and exchange value is transcended since everything becomes collective, both individually and socially, thanks to the mediation afforded by the « social-surplus value » and by the egalitarian redistribution it implies. The social exchange will then become a pure « gift », that is to say an act deprived of any personalised or ritualised after-thoughts, and therefore a socially accepted act that would be collectively regulated by a collective management apt to insure the emancipation out of the Realm of Necessity.

Interpersonal relationships and the issue of civil union – marriage or others – follow the same logic: The asymmetric and personalised authoritarian relationships are thus regulated through socialised power relationships, hence diffuse ones. However, this horizontal and egalitarian diffusion of authority does not send one back to the kind of authority that is one-step removed – for instance towards the maternal uncle, etc – This was the case in the French Polynesia which was so much to the liking of Paul Gauguin because of its connotations to the uncorrupted Rousseauiste state of nature, uncorrupted notably by the stock exchange and by marriage. Rather they send us back to the Marxist historical transcending and recomposition which advantageously substitute to the status relationships and to their capitalist subtracts while preserving the autonomy of the decision-making processes of each of us. Simone de Beauvoir had warned: With the equality between Man and Woman and more widely with the definitive affirmation of the primacy of historical becoming over Nature but in harmony with it, one must expect the substitutions of determinate individual and social relationships with others. Nostalgia has no place here. The social and interpersonal relationships remain a matter of « poetry » , to wit a process of creation, a « merveilleux bouquet japonais » in the act of its composition, if you will.

Let us return briefly to the issue of the « social circulation of women and men » following the lead of P.P. Rey. It is a necessity, an « invariant » for all societies if we apprehend this invariant in the manner of Vico and Marx. This invariant is thus the Human axis on which the dialectics of Nature and History meet thus making possible the Overall dialectics. It is thus necessary to analyse carefully the specific forms this takes according to both modes of production and historical epochs.

In summary these forms are compatible with equality and liberty. It will then be apparent that the issue of the structuring of personality and, in particular, the issue linked to the image one has of oneself will largely dissipate thanks to the widest possible emancipation. In brief, we are thinking notably here to matrimonial constraints – so-called arranged marriages – which rest on a system that conjugates the social circulation of Human beings with the transmission of private property and cast or class privileges. Based on the reality of an advanced  democratic society, one that does offer a certain level of « social security », Lacan used to say, perhaps trivializing a bit the issue, that each of us is the discourse of others. Fortunately, without having to go through a « saison en enfer » – A. Rimbaud – nor having to be confronted too long to a Barbedienne bronze, each of us is equally the other critique of all Others.

With more or less efforts we all succeed in knowing ourselves as social beings. And even at times acting as such. For instance, the school now destined by some to privatization should also teach every chid all the idioms they need to participate on the par to all social discourses. Saying it without detour, though in a different if partial manner, it would be preferable to invest on a non oppressive fight against obesity instead of endlessly regurgating the ill-intentioned fears about homosexual marriages, that is to say about the freer and more helpful social circulation of women and men. Instead of dividing and isolating, let us attempt to re-establish the mutual attraction of minds and bodies in order to finally give a chance to the poetry of equality and freedom, instead of limiting this to hazardous and isolated cases.

In the present context, the Left and progressive forces cannot ignore this debate. What is at play here is their own souls. Thus, in this domain, they cannot succumb to a « defensive » strategy with the pretext not to go against the so-called « silent majority ». They know full well that this majority, termed silent, does harbor an intimate conception of « spirituality » while carefully keeping its distances from any constraining cult; they also know that this so-called silent majority is now pray, against its will, to the offensive of neoconservative forces. Instead one should recognise that these debates go to the heart of the contemporary class struggle, thus implying the necessity to forge ahead specifying with great force the « stakes » at play as well as the guarantees offered by the Republic.

Social consensus are formed by mass pedagogy and by the intellectual and social mobilisation. Each of us must understand that the liberty of others, the concretely evidenced difference of others, is the very condition on which is founded our own entitlement to existing Human rights as well as the best guarantee that these same rights will continue to progress toward the greatest individual and collective emancipation. All citizens be they on the Left, on the Right or in the center are conscious of this. Their preoccupations are « defensive »: What frighten them in reality is nothing else than the financially too real fear to end up with a regressive superposition of civil unions and of private unions such as religious marriage or other unions. In effect, with such an aggressive superposition they run the risk to simultaneously endanger their « household » – hence their standard of living – and their intimacy, that is to say the conception they entertain of themselves as « historical bloc » belonging fully to the historical republican ensemble.

As I demonstrated in the « Le lit du néofascisme » in www.la-commune-paraclet.com a certain Left, sacrificing too easily to the ludic games theories of « social justice » according to Rawls, does abandon too easily its struggle for egalitarian social redistribution. In so doing, it abandons the preservation of the dignity and autonomy of individuals and groups in favor of juridical measures, often constraining, that moreover cost nothing. In so doing, it is shooting itself in the foot. Especially when the least fraudulent theoreticians – such as R. Passet – underline the 10 plus percentage points of GDP lost by the proletariat during the last years for the sole benefice of profits largely re-invested in increasingly speculative endeavors. (Added note, Feb 2017:For USA readers just refer to the productivity gains not or badly redistributed during the last forty years.)

Such measures demonstrate its degree of internalisation of the neo-conservative values in the indifferently « cooperative » Rawlsian sauce, usually cooked up for the specific usage of the « willing » lower-clergies on the Left. These servi in camera have fully understood that they have no change to survive outside the capitalist market, despite its possible « asymmetric » information, no doubt because the big multinational corporations have really replaced the corner baker and butcher at least since the 1920! Naturally, to this new fad revealed of late as a gospel, is added their instinctive submission to the capitalist system. For them, this system only need to be minimally regulated, instead of being transcended once and for all thanks to a « revolutionary reformist » strategy.

The minimum regulation intended specifically sends one back to that diagnosed by von Hayek and M. Friedman and others of the same ilk, these worthy scientists now so dear to the « Left », to the Chilean people. This negation of one own self, this « renegade » act to use the scientifically correct word used by Lenin, is, to say the least, disheartening. It is a vain and counter-productive posture. But this trend is in phase with the philo-Semite Nietzschean lunacies of a Samuel Huntington, the same who labored for clashes of civilisation going hand in hand with the restoration of the principle of deference to « authority ». It also arched back to restore deference to the disciplines – narratives –  belonging to self-elected casts as well as to the rebuilding of the temple. Yet, it is properly harmful for the becoming of the whole Human species and of the Left in particular. As far as Huntington is concerned, aside from his « strategic hamlets », he also worked to dispel what the Trilateral Commission called arrogantly « the rising expectations of the people » thus leading to the dismantlement of the Cola clause and of the already minimum American Welfare State …

Two major conceptions.

Elaborating on this problematique we are forced to concur with the theses of certain socialist figures who did insist on the determining importance taken here by the « children ». For a species based on sexual reproduction and the specific forms this takes according to the epochs concerned, children fast become the pivot around which the intimate and socio-political nature of the « household » unfolds as well as that of the modes of production and reproduction in which it is inscribed. This is clearly even truer in the framework of a Republic which sees itself as espousing the ideas of « liberty, equality and fraternity. »

In the last three decades the status of children gave rise to two main conceptions. This evolution goes hand in hand with the crisis of Western capitalism and the successive transformation  which it imposes on society in general and households in particular. It does this in an effort to discipline the labor force through the control and orientation of its sexuality forms – See on the subject Gramsci’s notes on Fordism and sexuality.

The father figure, fragmented families and modern households

A ) The first line of thought has a direct religious and Freudian origin. I have demonstrated in the second section of my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme – in part translated in English in the Section Livres-Books of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ) to what degree, despite its apparent anti-clericalism, Freudism is nothing else than a modern reediting of a particular religious thought totally taken with its social hierarchical fancies, seen as the result of a divine intervention, and consequently as the sign already predetermined of its « destiny ».

At the heart of this ideology, one finds the « figure of the father », that is to say the preliminary choice made in favor of the restoration of the traditional – and bourgeois – nuclear family, with its three poles of domination and submission. All those who speak of children while preliminarily subjecting their conception of children to this Freudian conception of the « father » are wrong. This is because they are subjecting it to a social hierarchy over-determined by a peculiar concept of the divine which implies the patriarchal and war « chief » as its representative on Earth. If effect they do no enunciate clearly their ideological presuppositions. To do so would constitute the sole democratic guarantee available against any tentative – Masonic lodges or others – to foster false representation.

This is antithetical to the very concept of citizenship. In its more outrageous and gratuitous form, these fans of authoritarian discipline never hesitate to manipulate the generally presupposed culpability imputed to people. They ill-intentionally superpose to this generic problematic usually linked to the transition effectuated during child sexuality, that problematic statistically insignificant but linked to pedophilia, from which clear political and ideological advantages are expected. Simply, because it rests on the natural manifestations of the child sexuality of any one of us. This is a stage of the development of personality on which, as is scientifically known, weighs an ensemble of systemic constraints churned out by the bourgeois societies, so that the culpability theorised by the Freudians can be assumed to be a « general » phenomenon and more importantly be easily fabricated according to need. In such a way, these « Scientifics » would held the power to silence their opponents. The omnipresence of surveillance systems is obviously marshalled in this sense! Isn’t the avowed objective of Freudism the « return » to « normalcy », a concept carefully defined by Freudians themselves but which has the typical advantage to be congruent with the social control necessary to the dominant classes?

It would better to put aside these Masonic and Nietzschean regurgitations concerning the « father figure » and to recall instead a simple idea: Since children can now be conceived in the lab, the crucial matter is not to so much to procreate them but instead to educate them with dignity inside an intimate (« household » ) and a social organisation (an emancipated society benefiting from the Marxist theory of psychoanalysis ) prone to insure their dignity and their development as free Human beings and thus necessarily egalitarian by instinct. Joséphine Baker, the great artist and Resistant who stole the secret codes of the fascist Italian Army, showed the way with her Rainbow family along with Karl Marx when he affirmed that a communist society would allow every individual having the potential to become a Raffaello to effectively become a new Raffaello.

Be it as it may nothing indicates that children raised within « fragmented families » are less structured than others. Everything depends on the education and leisure – i.e. qualitative socialisation – they are fortunate to enjoy and of the life choices they are able to make – valorisation of specific behaviors by near or distanced entourage, political and artistic choices, Human values etc.

Consequently, as logic would teach, it is important to adequately finance all the necessary social programs and/or to allow the other types of civil unions that complete them or even, in some cases, that palliate their absence or there underdevelopment. This is because these programs will always fall short of expectations at least as long as the National – or Multinational such as the EU – Social Formations (SF) will feel obliged to subject their social needs to a logic of insertion in the World Captialist Economy, one that is more or less regulated.

Such SF invariably oppose the dominant logic of capitalist exchange value to that of use value instead of adequately conjugating both as would be made possible on the basis of an international socialist division of labor or on one simply founded on the primacy of full-employment – which should be the object of a revised definition of the anti-dumping at the WTO – and of public property, that is to say one founded on the collective management of the « social surplus value ». As we can see the potential development of « petits princes » and of «nouvelle Héloïse » is susceptible to revolutionarize the social relations of production in their entirety as much as poetry. At least if we take them seriously without forcing them to lie about themselves.

Families, households and transmission of values

B ) The second line of thought concerns what some theoreticians have called « the transmission of values », without any a priori judgement about them. This sends us back to a proto-Marxist sociological analysis, the concretisation of an authentic method of investigation orientated in the optic of the specification of all the elements which contribute to the concrete progress of individual and collective emancipation within societies travelling toward ever higher levels of equality and liberty. By definition, these societies rest on the a priori, let us say synthetic, of gender parity.

The question then becomes: Which are the urgent and necessary measures needed to insure that all children, independently from the family or social conditions, be able to enjoy a good transmission of values – educational, affective etc. – that are necessary to their becoming emancipated Human beings and free citizens who partake fully in the affairs of the City.

We all know more or less what is entailed: The basic universally accessible social programs with a particular attention paid to kindergartens and education; the refuges for battered women; organised holydays and ludic extra-scholar activities that are able to foster an harmonious socialisation rather than the learning of an imposed discipline and thus an alienating one; amateurial sports, culturally colored entertainment, culture and arts in their most sophisticated aspects etc., etc. All of this, yes! But also the legal possibility to enter into more intimate units. Not necessarily « marriage » , a unit constrained by stern and hypocritical religious scriptures as well as by the always active avatars of patriarchal authoritarianism. This is sometimes exercised in our societies by women placed in a situation of emulation of the homo-economicus specific to capitalism.  But instead, what is intended are those inter-personal relationships still to be invented in their plenitude, civil or free unions. Those for which no one would feel compelled to exclaim, as André Gide: « Famille, je vous hais » (« Family, I hate your »).

Indeed these are « free » in the sense that the secular State, following the wishes of the citizens, codifies all the forms – which correspond to a given epoch – that are compatible with the equality, liberty and responsibility of all the parental and filial poles of these new units. This has nothing to do with passing « politically correct » laws; the reverse is true.  The goal is to undermine the « politically correct » strategy, with its transatlantic catechism which purposefully dramatise some behaviors in order to provoke the manipulated reaction of the so-called « silent majority » mischievously brought to see in it a menace to its own stability. In the end, the republican State must remain true to its nature; its task is not so much to pass laws on specific behaviors but rather to ensure the possibility for all citizens to chose by themselves the behaviors they prefer, as long as this choice, freely exercised does not infringe on those of others. In so doing, the republican State would lay the material basis for the development of the Human psyche in its progress toward its recovery of its own individual and social self, that is to say in its struggle to construct itself as a non-alienated being.

Only thus will we be able to respect children rights and simultaneously those of the other poles in the « household », the latter remaining the basic unit for the sexual reproduction in all its forms. Obviously these are crucial for the immediate process of production as well as for the process of Enlarged social reproduction, hence for the process of social redistribution which gives coherency to the whole system according to the level of the collective control of the « social surplus value » attained.

Let us be crystal clear here: The choice to return to a triangular family with the pretext of rehabilitating the father figure can only lead to a disaster because of the increasing pauperisation of the traditional middle classes caused by the heaviest tendencies of modern capitalism. Worse still, this will be manipulated by philo-Semite Nietzscheanism imagined by people owing their diplomas to criteria too often far-removed from their own personal merit. These are mainly « Americans »; but some French and now even the majority of transfuge apparatchiks from the collapsed East Bloc are fast following in their tracks. Their ideological outbidding is so infantile that it earned them the sarcastic reproaches of the Sokal and Bouvresse of this world who in effect share with them the same mind set and the same Popperian methodology, although with a somewhat more rigorous concept of what is « academic » work.

Conclusion: Neoliberal specter or solidarity

I suspect that the main experience which moves all these serious folks is that of the « economic reconstruction » after the First and Second World Wars. The demobilisation of soldiers following the First World War happened in the euphoric context and the harsh diplomatic tugging that lead to the Versailles Treaty. However, this was done without the planning of the reintegration of this strongly discipline manpower made of young soldiers – Engels was here proven right. This was happening at a time when the young Soviet Union was getting established along with its initial miracles in terms of resistance and in terms of socio-economic development.

In the West this caused memorable marches composed of young workers and unemployed on Washington and many other capitals of the World as well as a feared and undeniable advancement of communist ideals in the United-States. (Added note Feb 2017: The American reader has been disposed from its post-war social history, including the eminent role played by many Communist led industrial unions which played a major role in the most advanced legislations of the New Deal. An echo is found for instance in the writing of Steinbeck, not only his essays on the sharecroppers but also the favorable allusion to the Reds at the end of one of his masterpieces, The Grapes of wrath.)

The lesson was put to profit during the Second World War. The Western post-war planning was initiated when the war was still been waged … on the Pacific front. Important measures were taken long before the enacting of the Marshall Plan which had been calculated to transform Europe into a subventionned market for US enterprises now in overproduction. Among those there were the « return of women to the status of housewife » in order to free jobs for the « boys » returning from the war fronts, at least those who could not or did not know how to benefit from the education grants generously offered with the aim to train a more specialised manpower. Women were « compensated » by the liberation of the « forced war saving » – Victory bonds – which allowed the conversion of the war-dedicated assembly-lines into the production of domestic utilities for a clientele scientifically fabricated and enticed to consume by the advertisement in magazines which inheritated without scruples the efficiency of the war propaganda techniques. (Add to this the consumering competition between classes engineered by Veblen …)

The American post-war miracle was thus initially based on the return of women in the home in order to save capitalism. With the death of FDR, Truman refused to follow in the tracks of the New Deal to implement a more egalitarian social redistribution, hence a better planning of effective demand. One will have to wait for the « rebellion » of the sons and daughters of the generation who had fought during the war and that of the workers who were beginning to be threatened by the introduction of industrial automatisation, in order to witness the rebirth of social progress in the guise of the « Just Society ».

Its main objective, at least for President Johnson, was to organise a popular consensus in support of American imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere. The goal was to create the necessary conditions for the defence of an increasing standard of life and for a freedom in life style co-opted by the Star system, often marked by a strong « consumerist » vulgarity, although it was one that was smartly sold as the realisation of the « American dream » adapted to the aspiration of adolescents. Not surprisingly this quickly became the ultimate arm directed against the presumed totalitarianism and rigorism attributed to the Eastern Bloc – despite Hoover, his FBI and its hallucinatory manipulations of campuses, in accord with the CIA.

In effect, the Just Society strategy amounted to the transfer of some productivity and competitiveness gains to the proletariat, the middle classes and the students of the United-States, in order to re-establish an hegemony which could have slipped from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Suffice here to recall the students of Berkeley who were victims of a subterrean war conducted by the FBI and the CIA when they launched their contestation of the American Fordist system before their European colleagues. The liberation of customs in the West owes them a lot.

It is therefore not surprising that the USA were equally the country in which the reaction tried to march backward with Reagan even before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. After his studies on the Vietnamese « strategic hamlets », within the Trilateral Commission Samuel Huntington did theorise the counter-attack in the name of the « deference to Authority ». Retrospectively, one can see that this was conceived as a step in the effort to lay the ground to a necessary reactionary consensus needed to launch the philo-Semite Nietzschean preventive wars of civilisation which rage today. However, the mass repudiation of war demonstrate that the libertarian and republican spirit characteristic of the USA did not yet say its last word: Lately, Massachusetts refused to bow to the reactionary counter-offensive against gay marriage.

Recognizing that all these Nietzschean forms are compatible with the promotion of the Fascist token women needed to play the role of the « overwomen » destined to triumphant « overmen », but instinctively knowing how not to overstep their bounds especially within the family precincts, we easily see the attraction exercised by a new selective return of women to the status of housewife. But it needs to be a soft return that knows how to transform the general demands of feminism in strictly corporatist and cast demands. G. B. Bush already caused the revision of the social assistance available to single mothers and the legislation of financial help for the marriage option!

Since we are dealing in frightening fantasies, can you ever imagine for a while a genetitian drifting put on the service of these « nuclear » couples with such an inflated ego at time with their specific  Dasein »? We are told to read Carl Schmitt knowing full well what he was saying and for whom. (American would want to check the influences on a Leo Strauss in Chicago University and others such …) Meanwhile, in France, the field had been prepared by the triumphant return of a Marguerite Yourcenar in the French Academy; she was a great admirer of Nietzschean ephebs and overmen, especially as they corresponded to the  ideal » of a return to the « aesthetic » refinement of the amoralism of the Roman Empire at its apogee. This same virago had managed to escape the sort of a too vulgar Céline, as she preferred to flee in the magnificent and discrete « rolling hills » of New England where she was able to live her various passions away from indiscrete eyes, while letting time erase the traces of her beginnings. (To be fair we should credit her with very beautiful translations of popular poetry that are at the foundations of American jazz.)

No one can ignore that the dismantling of the Welfare State opens the road to the reintroduction of a new domesticity by way of a endemic precarization of the labor force. This is badly legitimated by the promises of an « minimum annual guaranteed income » as proposed by Milton Freidman or even that of a minimum but « just » revenue which would unfold from the necessary and scientifically regulated « third road » proposed by a pathetic Rawls and by other Giddens who laboriously pretend to ignore that surplus value is uniquely created by Human labor.

The proposed class « cooperation » feigns to ignore the asymmetry prevailing between the « players » at the beginning of the « game » simply because it wants to treat the factor of production, labor, hence the minimum hourly wage, as a neutral material factor, totally disembodied from all human dimensions be it in Berlin and Paris or in Slovakia and Romania!

We are living in an age in which unemployment will inexorably grow and in which the neocon regressive fiscal policy has already undermined the basis for the minimalist Smithian State and not only that of the post-War Welfare State. Suppose then that you have to chose between higher unemployment rates and the return of women to the housewife status, above all for the working class and the most pauperised groups, what would you chose? I believe that you would reject both alternatives and that you would state loudly that since labor alone creates exchange values the profits of the capitalists are nothing but the result of an extortion by the dominant class. This extortion of what essentially is a « social surplus value » derives from the « double twirl » (Marx, PP Rey) of capitalist exploitation.

In fact, the pressing socio-economic and political task of our generation is to democratically control this social surplus value in order to be able to support the march toward ever more Human emancipation. Supported by the proletariat and by the political parties close to it, the March forward is the only antidote available against a Nietzschean return in all its possible forms. Such a return would mean a return to barbarism, by definition sexist and patriarchal.

Without any display of ill-placed righteousness against « peripatetism », a phenomenon still poorly understood, you would certainly reject any moralizing return to the traditional bourgeois family, which suffocates in its own contradictions without recourse to a socially organised prostitution practiced in « maisons closes » that adapt their style to their clients valets. As Fellini did show with his brilliant cinematographic dialectics in his « Rome, open city ».

The term « peripatetism » is preferably employed here instead of « prostitution », the latter being a phenomenon aggravated by its merchandizing aspect which reifies individuals as simple exchange values made available on the market. In the sense used here, « peripatetism » is more akin to a form of « libertinage », however one that is socially constrained by « fashionable » relationships which, due to transient infatuation, reveal very crude social relationships of subordination, much more than the selling of sexual services as such. In fact, we are dealing here with what I called a « truncated dialectics », a dialectical « moment » which never reaches its intended objective.

It is superfluous to emphasise that the mediatic strategy of rehabilitation of prostitution is launched in parallel with that of the « defense of children » via, among other things, the questioning of the right to abortion, as well as with the traditional « defense of the family ». Everyone can witness the fact that various editing houses that had inherited prestigious catalogs of which they are hardly worthy any loner, do actively partake in this strategy. In so doing, they confuse their cultural mission – often carried out with public funds – with a sort of very philo-Semite Nietzschean « capitalist realism », prone to propaganda. As we know Greeks and Persians did influence themselves mutually; similarly, one can witness the influence of the infantile a-historical archetypical and venal oppositions fabricated between  « Mozart » and « Saltieri » within a certain « willing » literature – not forgetting its initial dossiers graciously provided … And, in effect, it is hard to believe that the print out could procure a living without the many subterfuges of distribution and internal accounting, aside from the indecent and aggressive marketing derived from military disinformation techniques.

As we can see, a specter once « deconstructed » but now cloned anew, is haunting the World. It is that of inhuman capitalism, a capitalism that fell entirely pray to its own « animal spirits ». It is obsessed by the « vital » necessity of its class character even at the cost of a sustained regression back to a more archaic system of domination of Man by Man. This is its schizophrenic character. Thus, the situation demands intellectual and political lucidity. Not so much to foil the traps of an adversary whose mind set and narrative tricks are now well known from the inside, for instance those of the « nouveaux philosophes » and of their political masters. These people are now revealed for what they truly are to a large public. The 5^th column-type efficiency of these ideologues has vanished. (Added note Feb 2017: That of the « nouveaux économistes » will last even less; see, for instance, my definitive critiques of Piketty and of Tirole; the first is available in the Books review section of www.la-commune-paraclet.com ; the second in this anthology.)

Instead, the pressing issue is to be able to win the consent of the so-called silent majority, a highly manipulable group that will be increasingly economically weakened, in favor of the March towards the Guiding Star of Emancipation. But this time it will be an authentic march because all the participants will be conscious of what is at stake. They will take into account all the historical disillusions as well as all the anterior experiences of the proletariat.

This march needs to be scientifically informed. This does not concern only the new contributions relative to the Marxist Labor Law of Value which must acquire a high priority. It also concerns all the scientific progresses that have a clear civilizational character, simply because they establish the material conditions which allow the authentic exercise of freedom of choice to all individuals. The Marxists theory of « psychoanalysis » and of « laicity » – separation of Church and State – are thus primordial.

To them must be added social solidarity. I am thinking here of the film by Bertrand Tavernier which examined the devastating haunting fears that were induced during the Middle Ages by pandemics typical of these remote times. They not only affected the life of individuals but also the reproduction possibilities as well as the harmonious development of couples and indeed of the whole species. Tavernier was thinking of the possible regression of customs due to the eruption of Aids. Various pressure groups, among which the most active were homosexual groups, refused to capitulate to induced guiltiness and to dangerous conformism, and in so doing allowed society as a whole to react against a real danger without sacrificing its solidarity and without uselessly renouncing to its libertarian – in the sense of demo-cratic – conquests nor to its dutiful individual and collective responsibility.

The lesson is essential and should not be lost. It demonstrates how it is possible to resolve crises positively, turning problems into opportunities. It only takes some consciousness, social solidarity and the public organisation of medical research, going hand in hand with the public care of patients. This example deserves wide emulation. This is even more obvious when one thinks of the devastating effect an efficient vaccine would have on all the Huntingtonian and Nietzschean pretences that aim at the instrumentalisation of a « return » toward enforced discipline and the « deference » toward « Authority », one which would be unilaterally invested with the mandate to insure our happiness just like the Great Inquisitor of Dostoevsky.

The development and generalisation of oral contraception conjugated with women employment – hence their financial autonomy – tells the tale. Some people are afraid of these developments. But, in honor of the Bloomsberry circle, that is to say of this peculiar group of artists and intellectuals who, though they were disconnected from the proletariat, were nonetheless able to think a more equitable and people-friendly world, we simply ask: Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf, when she was always ready, provided one would be worth it, to «That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately ». Rimbaud wrote: « Je est un Autre ». As Marx used to say, as Verlaine, Garcia Lorca, Paul Eluard or the great poetess Sappho could have said, the Individual is the couple, that is to say a couple which is living a free love. Or, again, who can ever forget the Humanist and anti-fascist poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini?

The republican democratic State has three principles: liberty, equality and fraternity. Victor Hugo specified that Liberty was to objective, Equality the condition and Fraternity the means. The Republic does not harbor any sexual preference.

Paul De Marco, May 16, 2004. (translated in English in February 2017.)

Copyright La Commune Inc, May 16, 2016.

Note: The articulation of some themes exposed here were influenced in part by the debate relative to the institutionalisation of customs published in the lemonde.fr, even though I was not always able to have access to the integrality of many of the original texts mentioned.