by
Gilbert Mercier
History
never repeats itself, but from time to time, consciously or not, some
influential men attempt to force us into the monstrosity of their
imaginary time machines to try to reverse decades, and in the case of
feudalism, almost a millenium of social progress. The mid-20th
century brought the years of collective psychosis of Adolf Hitler’s
“thousand year Reich,” and more recently what can be viewed as
the United States of America’s imperialist manifesto or so-called
“Project for the New American Century”, concocted in 1997 but
still in effect today under the current administration, with the
self-proclaimed objective to “promote American global leadership”
resolutely and by military force, if necessary.
Montesquieu
and his colleagues of the mid-18th century, such as Voltaire, Diderot
and Rousseau of the Age of Enlightenment, denounced feudalism as
being a system exclusively dominated by aristocrats who possess all
financial, political and social power. During that time, which
incubated the French Revolution and built its ideological
foundations, feudalism became synonymous with the French monarchy. To
the Enlightenment writers, feudalism symbolized everything that was
wrong with a system based on birth privilege, inequality and brutal
exploitation. In August 1789, shortly after the takeover of La
Bastille on July 14, one of the first action of the Assemblee
Constituante was to proclaim the official abolition of the “feudal
regime.”
Ironically,
feudalism is making a comeback in the latest evolution and under the
impulse of predatory global capitalism. After all, Karl Marx, in the
mid-19th century, considered feudalism to be a precursor of
capitalism. Typically a feudal system can be defined as a society
with inherited social rank. In the Middle Ages, wealth came
exclusively from agriculture: the aristocracy strictly assumed
ownership of the land while the serfs provided the labor.
The feudal
system of the Dark Ages was the social and economic exploitation of
peasants by lords. This led to an economy always marked by poverty,
sometimes famine, extreme exploitation and wide gaps between rich and
poor. The feudal era relation of a serf to his lord is essentially
identical to the relation of a so-called WalMart associate to a heir
of the Walton family. If one looks objectively at the power stratum
in the US circa 2013, and the one of, let’s say, France circa 1750,
it is hard to ignore the startling similarity. For example,
attendance at Ivy-League schools in the US is principally an
inherited privilege; the same can be said for elected positions in
Congress. The concept of dynasties rules, not personal merit.
A powerful
network of oligarchs worldwide seems to be pursuing the objective to
set back the social clock to before the era of Enlightenment so as to
return us to the Dark Ages of lords and serfs: a new era of global
slavery to benefit Wall Street’s “masters of the universe.”
Compared to the Middle Ages, today’s servitude is more insidious:
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and many private
banks operate like mega drug dealers. The IMF and World Bank do so
with countries, while the banks do so with individuals. Once Greece,
Detroit or John Doe is addicted to its fix — loans in this case —
the trick is done. After a while, money must be borrowed even to
service the debt.
In a recent
cynical opinion piece titled “Detroit, the New Greece”, New York
Times columnist and Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman
reasoned more like a callous Wall Street operator than someone with
the self-proclaimed humanist “conscience of a liberal” by
casually calling Detroit a “victim of market forces.”
“Sometimes
the losers from economic change are individuals whose skills have
become redundant; sometimes they are companies serving a market niche
that no longer exist; and sometimes they are whole cities that lose
their place in the economic ecosystem,” writes Krugman, forgetting
Greece in his laundry list of “innocent victim of these mysterious
“market forces.” Krugman concludes his paragraph with: “Decline
happens,” as if this is a physical phenomenon, like gravity or
magnetism. Like most of the leading international economists, Krugman
has adamantly supported the North America Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Detroit and Greece
are not some sort of collateral damage of “market forces” in
Krugman’s “decline happens” scenario. Detroit was demolished
wholesale by NAFTA, and Greece was enticed to borrow money to join
the EURO zone.
The IMF
itself recently conceded that the policies it has implemented for
Greece resulted in “notable failures.” The IMF failed to push for
an immediate restructuring of Greece’s debt, but didn’t prevent
money owed by the country before 2010 to private-sector creditors
from being fully repaid at the onset of the fiscal crisis. Greece’s
overall debt level remained the same, except it was now owned to the
Euro-zone taxpayers and the IMF instead of banks and hedge funds.
Both Greece and Detroit were targets of a predatory capitalism that
sought to downgrade and then shut down all public sectors of an
economy.
The “market
forces” are not physical phenomena; they are the hyenas and
vultures from Wall Street who dismantle and then feed on the
carcasses of a city or country. Decline does not just happen; it is
engineered by the corporate entities of global capitalism to maximize
profit without regard for human costs. It is ultimately up to us, for
the common good of human kind, to put wrenches into the well-oiled
wheels of this global corporate machine that is breaking our backs by
grinding and crushing our accomplishments of more than 250 years to
return us to the servitude of feudalism.
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