In a previous article referring to the Cultural Battle, we spoke of the growth of the extreme right in the world and its hegemonic project in the context of the struggle between factions, and we said that behind both the failure of hypocritical progressivism and the resurgence of the right wing was the hand of the great puppeteer, the concentrated economic power that has finally established itself as a true parastate that decides the fate of humanity. But before referring to it, it is worth remembering what Silo said in the Humanist Document, which was written in 1993 and is now more relevant than ever.
…’Today it is not a question of feudal economies, or national industries, or even the interests of regional groups. Today it is a question of those historical survivors adapting their territory to the dictates of international financial capital. Speculative capital that is becoming concentrated worldwide. As a result, even the national state requires credit and loans in order to survive. Everyone begs for investment and provides guarantees so that the banks can make the final decisions. The time is coming when the companies themselves, as well as the countryside and the cities, will be the undisputed property of the banks. The time of the parastate is coming, a time when the old order must be destroyed.
At the same time, the old solidarity is evaporating. In short, it is the disintegration of the social fabric and the advent of millions of human beings who are disconnected and indifferent to each other despite the general hardship. Big capital dominates not only objectivity through its control of the means of production, but also subjectivity through its control of the media and information. Under these conditions, it can dispose of material and social resources at will, rendering nature irrecoverable and progressively discarding human beings. It has sufficient technology to do so. And just as it has emptied companies and states, it has emptied science of meaning, turning it into technology for misery, destruction and unemployment.
Humanists need not elaborate when they emphasise that today the world has sufficient technological capabilities to quickly solve the problems of vast regions in terms of full employment, food, health, housing and education. If this possibility is not realised, it is simply because the monstrous speculation of big capital is preventing it.
Big capital has already exhausted the market economy stage and is beginning to discipline society to face the chaos it has itself produced. In the face of this irrationality, it is not the voices of reason that rise dialectically, but the darkest forms of racism, fundamentalism and fanaticism. And if this neo-irrationalism is going to lead regions and communities, the scope for action by progressive forces is reduced day by day. On the other hand, millions of workers have already become aware of both the unreality of statist centralism and the falsehoods of capitalist democracy. And so it happens that workers rise up against their corrupt union leaders, just as the people question parties and governments. But it is necessary to give direction to these phenomena, which otherwise will stagnate in spontaneity without progress. It is necessary to discuss the fundamental issues of the factors of production within the people. …
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It is clear that in the more than 30 years since this document was written, wealth has continued to concentrate rapidly regardless of the ideological leanings of governments, as the very mechanics of capitalist accumulation and concentration are like a steamroller that is unaffected by the lukewarm palliatives of progressivism. Today, 1% of the world’s billionaires accumulate more wealth than 95% of the population, and this not only translates into enormous inequality, but above all into an enormous concentration of power, above states and international organisations. Today, we are already governed by the parastate, and the growth of the right wing is nothing more than the political resource of Real Power to discipline societies in the face of the chaos it has caused; because in order for populations to endure rising unemployment and the constant deterioration of wages, it is necessary to manipulate the minds of a section of the population into supporting cruelty, while using authoritarianism to repress those who cannot be manipulated. The leaders of the far right are merely the instrument for disciplining societies, but the real power lies behind them. Just as those trains have a push locomotive at one end and a pull locomotive at the other, and we sometimes see them moving forward believing that they are being pulled by the locomotive at the front of the carriages, when in reality they are being pushed by the one at the rear, so too could we be deceived into believing that the far-right train is being driven by Trump, Meloni, Milei, Abascal or Le Pen, when in reality they are only the figureheads of the immense power that pushes from behind and uses them to manipulate and discipline. Meloni, Milei, Abascal or Le Pen, when in reality they are only the figureheads of the immense power that pushes from behind and uses them to manipulate and discipline.
Manipulating us into believing that our enemies are immigrants, or feminism, or the LGBT community; into believing that meritocracy consists of working longer and longer hours to survive, and that if we drive a delivery vehicle or ride a delivery bicycle, we are self-employed entrepreneurs who manage our own lives like good libertarians. Manipulating us to convince us that the economic deterioration of the middle classes in recent decades is the fault of ‘socialist ideas’ and not of the concentrating mechanics of Big Capital.
The Parastate needs a society of individualists who compete, hate each other, divide themselves and prey on each other, because solidarity is not good business. A few months ago, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a sort of far-right ideologue who rallied thousands of young people and strongly supported Trump’s campaign, some of his quotes were circulated, one of which was ‘I can’t stand the word empathy.’ That phrase possibly sums up the objective of the cultural battle that the far right wants to wage, convincing people that empathy is something negative. And if that is achieved, what sense would it make to show solidarity with immigrants fleeing poverty or violence in their countries? What sense would it make to show solidarity with discriminated minorities, with the marginalised, with those who suffer from hunger, with the unemployed? Because it turns out that if a society were concerned about all that, it might demand that the state provide more resources for the marginalised, better conditions for immigrants, and for that it would have to tax the richest, and that does not suit the parastate. And if society were concerned about the ecological disaster, it might demand changes that would affect the profits of predatory capitalism. Therefore, empathy is not good for business, solidarity is not good for business, ecological awareness is not good for business, and a good standard of living for the population is not good for business; and so the population must be manipulated into thinking the opposite, and those who cannot be manipulated must be repressed if they protest, and for both objectives, the ideology and slogans of the far right are extremely functional. That is why we say that the leaders of the far right are mere instruments of Real Power.
Of course, the current state of society makes it easier for them to manipulate subjectivity, because culture and education have been replaced by the compulsive immediacy of social media, and there we are at the mercy of fake news and distorted and fragmented information through the algorithms of Silicon Valley millionaires (who, together with the vultures of Wall Street, make up an important part of the Parastate). Given this situation, it is not surprising that there are more and more flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and proud militants of ignorance and superficiality among the ranks of the far right; because for societies to commit suicide, they must first be dumbed down.
It is nothing new that Real Power increasingly pulls the strings of politics in most of the world; we have always said that the separation of powers in the state has long since ceased to exist because all of them are co-opted by economic power, and if on some occasions the people elect someone who is not a partner of that Real Power to govern them, then the judicial and economic powers will take it upon themselves to put obstacles in their way until they fail. For some time now, those in power have either been controlled or conditioned, but today, given the acceleration in the concentration of wealth and the expulsion of labour due to the appropriation of technology by the ultra-rich, the social balance of traditional democracies is becoming unsustainable, and authoritarian governments are needed to discipline society. Some of these rulers may be part of the Real Power, as in the case of Trump, and others will be mere buffoons of the same, such as Milei, but they all have the same script written by a Parastate that already rules the world.
We might ask ourselves how long this situation can be sustained, because if the population is getting worse and worse, it could be assumed that at some point a rebellion will break out demanding change. But this is not so simple, first of all because the point is not only whether people are getting worse off, the point is knowing who to blame for their situation. Who does an unemployed person blame? A phantom investment fund based in some tax haven that forced layoffs in its controlled companies? Or their immigrant neighbour who still has a miserable job? And if climate change causes greater and more frequent flooding in a region, who will be blamed? The predatory multinationals that lobbied world governments not to take real measures that would limit their profits? Or the ruler of that region because he was unable to finance sufficient infrastructure works, as his tax revenue declined and his indebtedness to the banks increased? People tend to blame those who are most visible and closest to them, and media manipulation will contribute to pointing the finger at those who are most convenient for the powers that be. On the other hand, as the impoverishment of the people progresses, the palliative of a safety net for extreme poverty will always be less costly to maintain than making structural changes to ensure a fair distribution of wealth, and when the middle class becomes completely impoverished, there will come a time when they will be grateful to the state for providing them with a minimum subsistence income, while explaining that all the blame lies with the previous government. Argentinian President Milei is an example of this strategy. He slightly improved subsistence subsidies for the poorest as a safety net, while simultaneously impoverishing the entire middle class, so that more and more people will need this subsidy, and on balance, the per capita income of the population will have fallen dramatically, swelling the coffers of the richest. On another scale, in some regions, war can always be used as a resource if necessary, which not only decimates the population but also instils terror, and ultimately people prefer to resign themselves to a miserable life rather than suffer a war. What we mean by all this is that revolutions and structural transformations in a society are not an obvious corollary of its suffering or of supposed objective conditions; things can always be worse. Social self-pity is not enough to change course; human intention is needed, an image, a project, and a driving force. To change course, protests and spontaneity are not enough; we must add guidance and procedural vision. Of course, it is not easy, but everything will be more difficult if we remain resigned to the Real Power, or react to it irrationally.
But returning to this Parastate that has taken control of the world, let us not imagine that it is a homogeneous group of villains with money who organised themselves and conspired to take over the planet. Rather, it is the result of a long process of accumulation and concentration of wealth, due to the very mechanics of capitalism. This concentration means that there are fewer and fewer of them, and they are increasingly wealthy, and therefore have common interests and the ability to reach agreements, although they do not always do so. But while it is logical to think that those who have reached this stage are ambitious and voracious people, if it were not them, it would be others, because they are the result of a mechanism that exceeds them. In the same way, the marginalisation of millions of people is caused by this mechanism of income concentration and by technological advances that are not at the service of job creation but of the optimisation of corporate profits. It is clear that this mechanism of capitalism has reached a turning point where it can no longer advance without impoverishing the majority and destroying the planet. This mechanism must be changed, and at this point it is worth reflecting on the role that progressivism has played in recent decades.
Faced with the enormous power of this parastate and its social consequences, many voices have been raised, but few real projects for structural change have emerged. Surely, after the resounding failure of real socialism and the collapse of centralised economies, few dared to imagine, let alone propose aloud, an economy different from capitalism. At best, moderate alternatives have emerged that attempted to soften it or create palliatives to compensate society for growing inequalities. But not only did all this fail to work or achieve its goals, but the concentration of wealth and power ended up sweeping away even the most lukewarm alternative proposals, and so today the far right is advancing politically, because a large part of the population felt frustrated with the progressives who could not even fulfil the lukewarm proposals that brought them to power.
The time has come to raise the need for a change in the system. If the current system of production and consumption cannot include all the inhabitants of the planet, then it has failed. If the regimes and conditions of private property allow 1% of the population to take over the world, then something is very wrong and that system does not work. And if the mechanics of current growth and consumerism have led us to the destruction of the planet, then a substantial change of direction is urgently needed.
So, instead of self-censorship and drawing up proposals that are palatable to the powers that be and their media and propaganda, instead of asking permission to propose some small demand that does not greatly affect the interests of the powerful, perhaps we should start talking among the people about the need for structural change.
Ownership of the factors of production must be limited to prevent concentration, and workers must have a stake in it.
We cannot expect the productive reinvestment of profits and the consequent creation of jobs to depend solely on the will of the owners; such reinvestment must be enforced through tax policies.
Financial surpluses must go towards productive reinvestment, and financial speculation and tax havens must be eliminated.
The current model of productivity and consumerism must be radically changed because it is destroying the planet.
All this, and much more, will have to be discussed with the people to build a new society. We must not waste time asking those in power to do it, nor discussing it with the far right, nor asking permission from the parastatal sector. If the people understand this, it will be done, and if not, we will continue to accelerate towards the abyss, but we must speak the truth, without relativism or modesty.
