Tag: Society

‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.’ With this celebrated incipit from his Discourse on Inequality (1755), Rousseau reminds us what lies behind the institution of the border, and just how vexed this concept is. There is, first of all, the introduction of a physical discontinuity in space: a line, a wire, a fence, a wall. Then there is a proclamation, an affirmation that what’s on one side of that line is mine. Finally there is society’s acceptance of this assertion: I become the rightful owner of the land when society believes me to be so.

Rousseau thereby captures what history has demonstrated countless times: that a border is not a physical entity but a social construction that divides an inside from an outside – a division that, precisely because it is constructed, is liable to alter, disappear and reappear. Indeed, there is nothing so changeable as the ‘sacred borders of the homeland’. One feels a certain tenderness leafing through the atlases of fifty years ago. Or one is struck by sorrow, as I do whenever I travel between Italy and Austria and think of the hundreds of thousands killed in WWI to move a border that no longer exists; or through Alsace and Lorraine, transferred from the Germanic Holy Roman Empire to France in the late 1600s, then from France to Germany with the War of 1870, and again from Germany to France with WWI. Of course, borders also spring up where there were none before, as in the former Soviet Union. The ongoing war in Ukraine is essentially a border dispute – over Ukraine’s borders and NATO’s borders. Its anachronistic, nineteenth-century flavour is due not only to its brutal pattern of trench warfare, but also to its character as a boundary struggle: one that has now brought the entire planet to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

As a social construction, the boundary is always the (temporary) outcome of power relations. There is a particular metric, almost inhuman in its abstraction, that can be used to measure the violence with which it is drawn. This is straightness. Where borders are sinuous and jagged, every indentation and protrusion tells a centuries- or millennia-old story of rivalry, conflict, compromise, agreement. Where borders are rectilinear, on the other hand, there has usually been no such negotiation between the two parties, but an autocratic diktat expressed in the exactitude of the geometry. An almost straight north–south border runs for thousands of miles between Canada and the US. Straight lines also separate various American states, especially west of the Appalachians, where the previous inhabitants were ignored, the land considered ‘virgin’ and the geographical lines drawn with rulers. Likewise with many African nations, with the division of Papua New Guinea, and with the borders between Syria and Iraq, and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, decided at a desk by two officials, Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot, tasked with dismembering the dying Ottoman Empire in 1916.

But as borders change, appear and disappear, the border as the founding institution of world geopolitics becomes more and more problematic. It seems paradoxical that in the age of globalization, when the earth appears to us as a small blue planet, when human agency extends under the seas, into space and on the waves of the ether, the problem of borders seems to be more urgent than ever. It was at the end of the 1990s – the ideological apogee of globalization – that the new discipline of Border Studies took shape, giving rise to academic journals, conferences, factions and subdisciplines. At the turn of the millenium, all the trendiest sociologists gravitated towards ‘the border’, whatever their political orientation: Étienne Balibar, Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of European integration, traditional borders seemed obsolete, yet new forms of delimitation emerged. Thus, Sassen:

One of the features of the current phase of globalization is the fact that a process happens within a territory of a sovereign state does not necessarily mean that it is a national process. Conversely, the national (such as firms, capital, culture) may increasingly be located outside the national territory, for instance, in a foreign country or in digital spaces. This localization of the global, or of the non-national, in national territories, and of the national outside national territories, undermines a key duality running through many of the methods and conceptual frameworks prevalent in the social sciences, that the national and the non-national are mutually exclusive.

This is what Beck calls ‘globalization from within’, whereby borders no longer follow the territorial limits of the nation, but multiply, diversify and become sectorialized. There is no reason why the boundaries of ethnicity, culture or religion should coincide with those of states themselves:

When cultural, political, economic and legal borders are no longer congruent, contradictions open up between the various principles of exclusion. Globalization, understood as pluralization of borders, produces, in other words a legitimation crisis of the national morality of exclusion . . . if the nation-state paradigm of societies is breaking up from the inside, then that leaves a space for the renaissance and renewal of all kinds of cultural, political and religious movements. What has to be understood, above all, is the ethnic globalization paradox. At a time when the world is growing closer together and becoming more cosmopolitan, in which, therefore, the borders and barriers between nations and ethnic groups are being lifted, ethnic identities and divisions are becoming stronger once again.

With the twentieth-century revolutions in transportation, new types of borders cropped up. Airports are an anomaly, since there the border is located not at the edge of the country but within it. One of the UK’s border posts is located in the centre of Paris, at the Gare du Nord from which the Eurostar departs; another can be found in the middle of Brussels. With Covid-19, we saw the creation of temporary borders, such as those that prevented people from entering or leaving China’s vast metropolises. Still, it is interesting to see how confidently the shrewdest social scientists of the time presented globalization as irreversible and, without openly admitting it, situated themselves within the conceptual horizon of the ‘end of history’ – a concept widely mocked but tacitly embraced. Just as they were tracking the rise of ‘globalization from within’, the ultimate cosmopolitanization of human society, deglobalization was already waiting in the wings – ready to erupt with the successive shocks of Brexit, Trump, Covid-19, war in Ukraine and decoupling from China. Meanwhile, the frontiers of yesteryear were getting ready to take their revenge, in the oldest and most mythical fom: that of the wall, like the Vallum Adrianum or the Great Wall of China.

Mind you, barriers had never ceased to be erected – in concrete, latticework, or barbed wire (the list is not exhaustive):

• 1953: a 4 km wall between South and North Korea;
• 1959: 4,057 km of the Line of Actual Control between India and China;
• 1969: 13 km of peace lines in Ireland between Catholic Belfast and Protestant Belfast;
• 1971: a 550 km line of control between India and Pakistan to divide Kashmir;
• 1974: a 300 km green line between Greek and Turkish areas of Cyprus;
• 1989: a 2,720 km Berm between Morocco and Western Sahara;
• 1990: a 8.2 +11 km wall between the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and Morocco to block migration;
• 1991: a 190 km barrier between Iraq and Kuwait;
• 1994: a 1,000 km Tijuana wall between the US and Mexico.

But globalization has done nothing to curb the walling frenzy; quite the contrary:

• 2003: 482 km between Zimbabwe and Botswana;
• 2007: 700 km between Iran and Pakistan;
• 2010: 230 km between Egypt and Israel;
• 2014: 30 km between Bulgaria and Turkey;
• 2013: 1,800 km between Saudi Arabia and Yemen;
• 2015: 523 km between Hungary and Serbia;
• 2022: 550 km between Lithuania and Belarus;
• 2022: 183 km between Poland and Belarus.

Not to mention naval fortifications to prevent migrants from disembarking by sea. Still, perhaps the country that best exemplifies the level of sophistication – indeed, the level of perversion – that borders have reached, is Israel. This is how Eyel Weizman describes Clinton’s peace plan for the partition of Jerusalem:

64 km of walls would have fragmented the city into two archipelago systems along national lines. Forty bridges and tunnels would have accordingly woven together these isolated neighborhood-enclaves. Clinton’s principle also meant that some buildings in the Old City would be vertically partitioned between the two states, with the ground floor and the basement being entered from the Muslim Quarter and used by Palestinians shop-owners belonging to the Palestinian state, and the upper floors being entered from the direction of the Jewish Quarter, used by Jews belonging to the Jewish state.

In short, the proposed solution was to create a de facto airport, with the Arrivals and Departures located on two different floors that don’t communicate with one another, each with its own entrance and exit. So the border is not a line on a two-dimensional plane, as it appears on a map, but a dynamic partition in three-dimensional space – one whose complexity can be labyrinthine.

Where such ingenuity has been most striking, however, is in the construction of the 730 km wall separating Jewish settlements from Palestinian lands, which began to be constructed in 2002. Weizmann devotes a chapter of his magnificent Hollow Land (2007) to this wall and its consequences. Since those on each side of the partition must still be able to interact, the problem for Israeli planners is how to reconcile such interaction with isolation. For instance, when it comes to a highway that must serve Israelis and Palestinians,

The road is split down its centre by a high concrete wall, dividing it into separate Israeli and Palestinian lanes. It extends across three bridges and three tunnels before ending in a complex volumetric knot that untangles in mid-air, channelling Israelis and Palestinians separately along different spiralling flyovers that ultimately land them on their respective sides of the Wall. A new way of imagining space has emerged. After fragmenting the surface of the West Bank by walls and other barriers, Israeli planners started attempting to weave it together as two separate but overlapping national geographies – two territorial networks overlapping across the same area in three dimensions, without having to cross or come together.

In the face of such intellectual perversion, we must return to that fabled man who first fenced off a piece of land, and read Rousseau’s reaction to this founding act:

From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, filling in the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’

Read on: Chin-tao Wu, ‘Biennials without Borders’, NLR 57

How had no one thought of it before? As millions sweltered in record-breaking temperatures across America and Southern Europe, a solution was hiding in plain sight. Simple, effective, and right under our noses – yet it took the perspicacity of the President of the French Republic to spot it. During Paris fashion week, Macron’s Secretary of State for Ecology, Bérangère Couillard, announced a groundbreaking new measure: from next autumn, subsidies ranging from €6 to €25 will be available to any French citizen who has an item of clothing repaired. The climate crisis will be averted by a trip to the tailor or the cobbler. Thanks to the meticulous bureaucracy of the French state, we already have the fine print of this bonus réparation textile:

For a pair of shoes:

€8 for an insole

€7 for the heel

€8 for stitching or gluing

€18 for a complete resoling (€25 if the shoes are leather)

€10 to replace a zipper

For a garment:

€7 to mend a hole, tear or rip

€10 for a lining (€25 if it’s complex)

€8 for a zipper

€6 for a seam (€8 if it’s double)

It could be argued that before it starts encouraging consumers to be less wasteful, the French government ought to encourage the textile and footwear industries to curb their practice of planned obsolescence, by imposing warranties that would oblige them to repair defective items free of charge for several years, or requiring the use of more durable materials. Educating citizens about environmentally friendly practices is certainly no bad thing. But given that – as Mies van der Rohe once said – ‘God is in the details’, it is worth taking a moment to consider the sums involved. The total amount allocated for this revolutionary measure was €154 million. Assuming that this figure doesn’t include the cost of employing bureaucrats to assess requests, disburse subsidies and supervise the quality of the repairs, this means a handsome €2.26 has been allocated for each of France’s 68 million people. Even if one were to only consider the 29.9 million ménages composed of an average of 2.2 members, each household would receive a grand total of €5.13 per year. To put this in context, recall that the French state spent some €7 billion on its pointless colonial mission in Africa, Operation Barkhane, which ended in ignominy last year; roughly €100,000 euros per year for every solider dispatched to the Sahel.

These numbers say a lot about the extent of the French government’s environmental commitments, and, more broadly, about the gigantic practical joke being played by world leaders in their ‘declaration of war’ on global warming. It is not just Macron. Look at how the rulers of countries hit by the record-breaking July heatwave behaved: as if global warming was some future menace, to be mended with the odd €6 for a jacket here and there (or €10 if it’s lined).

We’re not dealing with denialists here: they are comparatively unthreatening, for their bad faith is transparent, and they grow more pathetic by the hour despite their corporate bankrolling. Far more dangerous are those like Macron – that is, the overwhelming majority of the world’s political class, irrespective of ideological orientation – who feign concern from their air-conditioned offices and private planes, and then do nothing. Worse than nothing, in fact: for they make the public believe that the problem can be solved with half-measures and palliatives, promoting market solutions for a problem created by the market itself.  

The world is currently suffocating beneath a deluge of plastic, yet the plastic industry, which may well have the most effective lobby on the planet, is glaringly absent from environmental debates. The oil industry on which it depends meanwhile has discovered an irrepressible passion for the environment, according to its advertising campaigns; the term ‘greenwashing’ is appropriate precisely because it recalls money laundering by criminal organizations. They also propose utterly improbable solutions. Think of the electric car delusion – in order to pollute less we apparently need to build an electrical grid spanning the entire globe, replace every single car in the world (trucks and vans included) and furnish them with batteries whose production is one of the most polluting processes known to man.

Scientists contribute to these absurdities. A recent report in Nature described attempts to introduce crystals into the ocean in order to increase its alkalinity: a quarter of carbon dioxide emissions end up in the ocean, which acidifies the water, making it potentially inhospitable to life. What this plan amounts to is throwing lime (or some equivalent) into the sea. The problem is that humanity produces 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year (in 1950 the figure was 6 billion). A quarter of this is over 9 billion tonnes, which could only be neutralized by a quantity of crystals of the same scale, which would presumably be dropped into the sea from the air. How much CO2 would be emitted by the production and global distribution of billions of tonnes of ocean antacid (without even discussing the immense pollution that this ‘solution’ would entail)?

Every year – as CO2 emissions and plastic production continue to climb – objectives that everyone knows to be unattainable are pompously announced. The 2015 Paris summit’s overarching goal was to hold ‘the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’ and pursue efforts ‘to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° above pre-industrial levels’, requiring greenhouse gas emissions to ‘peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030’. Such communiqués resemble a letter to Father Christmas; childish wishes for gifts to fall from the sky, or down the chimney. Only here governments around the world are writing Christmas letters to themselves. The World Meteorological Organization announced in May that there is a 66% chance that the 1.5° temperature rise will be reached before 2027. Yet the same organization maintains that already in 2022, the planet was 1.15 ± 0. 13° warmer than the pre-industrial average, making the last 8 years the warmest on record; that between 2020 and 2021 the increase in the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was the highest since measurements have existed (methane is far more damaging than carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect); that the rate of ocean level rises doubled between the decade 1993-2002 and 2013-2022; that ocean acidification is accelerating. And so on.

Yet the environmental crisis is treated as a future threat, notwithstanding the warnings emanating from outlets as close to polluting corporations as the Financial Times, which sternly informs its readers that we are dealing with ‘a present reality’. The planet is becoming unliveable already. As an acquaintance recently joked to me, ‘you can’t live locked in a refrigerator’; yet the fastest growing city in the US is Phoenix, where this summer the temperature exceeded 40° for more than a month, forcing people to rely constantly on air conditioning (which further accelerates global warming).

Inspired, perhaps, by Ionesco and Beckett, today’s world leaders have invented a politics of the absurd. To get a measure of the situation, one need only compare the attention, ideological mobilization and resources devoted to the war in Ukraine with those devoted to the environmental crisis. The difference being that while the war endangers the lives of 43.8 million people and directly impacts 9 million more who live in the disputed territories, the environmental crisis endangers the lives of billions of people, condemns billions more to poverty and starvation, and has already forced 30 million people a year to migrate, with some forecasts predicting 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. Meanwhile, Russia and NATO spend hundreds of billions on arms, while the war drives up commodity prices and government deficits. If just a tenth of these sums were devoted to the environmental crisis, the effect would be revolutionary.

This gives us a clear sense of how high the environment ranks in our ruler’s priorities. From a certain perspective, the masters of the earth behave towards nature as the US has towards Russia: waging a war against it without outright declaration. They treat the planet like marauders who plunder cities, burning everything to the ground. Why such obstinacy on behalf of our ‘cognitive aristocracy’? Why do they have it in for our planet? It’s not like they can emulate the marauders who, after sacking one city, could move on to the next. As much as they tout their mythical space industry, they will not be able to emigrate to a new planet after rendering this one uninhabitable. Pure recklessness, perhaps? A complete immersion in the present that effaces any thought of tomorrow? Boundless selfishness? The syndrome of the scorpion, for whom the earth plays the part of the frog? Or is it simple cowardice, a lack of courage to face the problem?

Perhaps a clue was recently provided by the ineffable Macron himself, when he spoke of the violence that broke out in late June among French youth – overwhelmingly children of immigrants living in the banlieues – triggered by the killing of a young man by the police. The solution, according to Macron, was simple: ‘order, order, order’. ‘Authority must be restored’ because the violence ultimately depends on a ‘parental deficit’. ‘An overwhelming majority’ of the protestors, he explained ‘have a fragile family framework, either because they come from a single-parent family or their family is on child support benefits’. In short, it’s the fault of single mothers (implied to have loose morals), who have failed to instil the values of civil etiquette in their turbulent offspring. In other words, the youth of the banlieues are violent because they’re sons of… To think we hadn’t realised! Maybe the elites exercise such violence on the planet because, without ever admitting it, they too are sons of…

Read on: Adam Hanieh, ‘Petrochemical Empire’, NLR 130.

When riots erupted in France at the end of June, it took police just under a week to make more than 3,000 arrests. Clashes on the streets of Paris and Marseille evoked other recent confrontations with the forces of state repression: think of the 22,000 arrests made by the Iranian police last autumn, or the 10,000 detained in America during the summer of Black Lives Matter. What do these three uprisings, across three different continents, have in common? To start with, the age and social class of the protesters. Those arrested were almost entirely under 30, and a disproportionate share were NEETs (those not in education, employment or training). In France and the US, this was linked to their status as racialized minorities: 26% of the youth population in zones urbaines sensibles are NEET, compared to the national average of 13%, and African Americans comprise almost 14% of the general population but 20.5% of NEETs. In Iran, meanwhile, the decisive factor was age: young people have lived their entire lives under US sanctions. Recent figures show that around 77% of Iranians between the ages of 15 to 24 fall into this category – up from around 31% in 2020.

The second common factor is even more striking. In all three cases, protests broke out following a murder committed by police: George Floyd, an African American, was killed in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020; the 22-year old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in Tehran on 16 September 2022; and the 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, of Algerian descent, in Nanterre on 27 June. In the aftermath of these killings, the media spotlight was placed on the ‘vandals’, ‘thugs’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘criminals’ who took to the streets, but rarely on law enforcement itself. In Iran, the identity of the policeman who caused Amini’s death isn’t even known. In France, Éric Zemmour’s spokesperson launched an online fundraiser to support the cop who killed Nahel, which collected more than €1.6 million before it was taken down.

A third feature connects such protests and their repression to unrest in other countries: monotonous repetition. There is always the same recurring scene: smashed shop windows, burnt-out cars, some looted supermarkets, tear gas and the occasional bullet from the police. In the West, the same formula has been operative for decades: the police kill a young person from a marginalized community; the youth of this community rise up; they destroy a few things and clash with the police; they are arrested. The atmosphere reverts to a kind of precarious tranquillity, until the police decide to murder someone again. (Iran’s protests last year were the first major uprising against police violence in the country – a sign that even the land of the ayatollahs is easing its way into ‘Western modernity’.)

France has a long history of such incidents. To give just a few indicative examples: in 1990, a young paralysed man named Thomas Claudio is killed in the suburbs of Lyon by a police car; in 1991, a policeman shoots and kills the 18-year-old Djamel Chettouh in a banlieue of Paris; in 1992, again in Lyon, the gendarmerie shoot and kill the 18-year-old Mohamed Bahri for attempting to evade a traffic stop; the same year, in the same city, twenty-year-old Mourad Tchier is killed by a brigadier-commander of the gendarmerie; in Toulon in 1994, Faouzi Benraïs goes out to buy a hamburger and is killed by police; in 1995, Djamel Benakka is beaten to death by a policeman in the police station of Laval. Fast-forward: the riots of 2005 were a response to the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15); those of 2007 sought redress for the death of two more, Moushin Sehhouli (15) and Laramy Samoura (16), whose motorcycle collided with a police car. The litany is unbearable: it would be sufficient to remember the death of Aboubacar Fofana (22) in 2018, killed by police in Nantes during an identity check. Note how strikingly Gallic the names of victims are: Aboubakar, Bouna, Djamel, Fauzi, Larami, Mahaed, Mourad, Moushin, Zyed . . .

The exact same dynamic can be found across the Atlantic. Miami, 1980: four white police officers are charged with beating to death a black motorcyclist, Arthur McDuffie, after he ran a red light. They are acquitted, precipitating a wave of tumult that rocks Liberty City, resulting in 18 deaths and over 300 injuries. Los Angeles, 1991: four white police officers beat up another black motorcyclist, Rodney King. The subsequent unrest causes at least 59 fatalities and over 2,300 injuries. Rioting spreads to Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose. Cincinnati, 2001: a white policeman kills a black man, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, and 70 people are injured in the ensuing protests. Ferguson, 2014: a white police officer kills Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man; riots, 61 arrested, 14 injured. Baltimore, 2015: a 25-year-old black man dies of various injuries incurred while he is detained in a police van; clashes leave 113 police officers injured; two people are shot, 485 arrested, and a curfew is imposed with the National Guard ultimately intervening. Charlotte, 2016: police shoot 43-year-old African-American Keith Lamont Scott; riots, curfew, deployment of the National Guard. A protester is killed during demonstrations, 26-year-old Justin Carr; 31 are injured. We eventually arrive at George Floyd; the scenario repeats itself.

British police have no reason to feel inferior to their transatlantic counterparts, nor their neighbours across the Channel. Here a few examples among many: Brixton, 1981: constant police brutality and harassment issues in protests and riots among the black community; 279 police and 45 civilians are injured (protestors avoid hospitals out of fear), 82 arrests, over 100 burnt vehicles, 150 damaged buildings, a third of which are set on fire. The upheaval spreads to Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds. Brixton, 1985: police search a suspect’s house and shoot his mother, Cherry Groce. A photojournalist is killed, 43 civilians and 10 police officers are injured, 55 cars are set on fire and a building is completely destroyed after three days of rioting (Cherry Groce survives her wounds but remains paralysed). Tottenham, 1985: a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, dies of cardiac arrest during a house search carried out by police, and a policeman is killed by crowds in the resulting riots. Brixton, 1995: protests after a 26-year-old black man dies in custody; 22 arrests. Tottenham, 2011: police shoot and kill Mark Duggan; riots break out, extending to other areas of London and then to other cities. Over the next six days, five people are killed, 189 police officers are injured and 2,185 buildings are damaged. Beckton, 2017: a 25-year-old black Portuguese man, Edson Da Costa, dies of asphyxiation after being stopped by police. In subsequent protests in front of the police station, four are arrested and 14 police officers are injured.

I imagine this list was as exasperating to read as it was infuriating to write. At this point, police violence cannot be considered a bavure, as the French say, but a persistent and transnational feature of contemporary capitalism. (It brings to mind Bertolt Brecht, who, faced with the reaction of the East German government to popular protest in 1953, asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected a new one?’) What’s astonishing is that after every one of these upheavals, thousands of pitiful urbanists, sociologists, ‘youthologists’, criminologists, healthcare professionals, charities and NGOs turn, in their contrition, to the profound social, cultural and behavioural causes of such ‘violence’, ‘excesses’, ‘outbursts’ and ‘vandalism’. The police, however, are not deemed worthy of the same attention. Police violence is often described but seldom scrutinized. Not even Foucault sharpened our understanding of it, focussing instead on specific sites where law enforcement is organized and institutionalised.

Policing has clearly evolved over the centuries: it has been subdivided into specialised corps (traffic, city, border, military and international police) and its tools have been refined (wire-tapping, tracking, electronic surveillance). But it has remained identical in both its opacity and its unreformability. The states mentioned above have never put meaningful police reform on the agenda. None of their governments has ever pushed for an alternative – for why would a regime want to tamper with its most effective disciplinary mechanism? Nor have upheavals, riots and agitations managed to bring about change. It would seem, conversely, that popular rage is a stabilising factor, a safety valve for the social pressure cooker. Ultimately, it solidifies the image that the powerful have of the populace. In Herodotus’s Histories, written in the 5th century BC, the Persian nobleman Megabyzus states:

There is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wanton­ness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what he is about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should there be any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything.

From the point of view of the regime, it may well be that riots are welcome, for they guarantee renormalisation, they permit social ‘bantustans’ to remain such, and they deflate discontents that could otherwise be perilous. Naturally, for them to perform this stabilizing function they must be subject to outward condemnation: vandalism should be denounced, violence should spark indignation, looting should cause disgust. Such reactions justify the ruthlessness of the repression, which becomes the only means to beat back the tide of barbarism. It is under these conditions that riots serve to ossify social hierarchy.

We cannot but recall the popular revolts that periodically shook the ancien régime and were regularly and mercilessly repressed: the Grande Jacquerie of 1358 (which gave rise to the common name for all subsequent peasant uprisings), the Tuchin Revolt in Languedoc (1363-84), the Ciompi Revolt in Florence (1378), the Wat Tyler’s Rebellion (1381), the Peasant’s War in Germany (1524-6), the Carnival in Romans (1580) and Masianello’s Revolt in Naples (1647). The historian Samuel Cohn has counted more than 200 of these instances in France, Flanders and Italy from 1245 to 1424. But it was the great historian Marc Bloch who noted how the feudal system needed these revolts to sustain itself:

A social system is not only characterised by its internal structure, but also by the reactions it provokes: a system founded on commandments can, in certain moments, imply reciprocal duties of aid carried out honestly, as it can also lead to brutal outbursts of hostility. To the eyes of the historian, who must merely note and explain the relationships between phenomena, the agrarian revolt appears as inseparable to the seigneurial regime as, for instance, the strike is to the great capitalist enterprise.

Bloch’s reflection leads us to the following question: if the jacquerie is inseparable from feudalism, and the strike from Fordist capitalism, then to what command system does the tumult of the NEETs correspond? There is only one answer: a system – neoliberalism – in which the plebe has been reconstituted. Who are these new plebians? They are the NEETs of the US high-rise projects and the neighbourhoods of south Tehran, the subproletarians of the zones sensibles. They are the class that many of today’s so-called ‘progressives’ disdain, fear, or at the best of times ignore.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The French Insurgency’, NLR 116/117.

On 24 September 1938, Benito Mussolini posed a question to a large crowd of his followers in Belluno: ‘Faced with the absolutely ridiculous alternative: butter or guns, what have we chosen?’ Their response was unequivocal: ‘Guns!’ Over the following years, Italians would suffer the consequences of this choice: massacres, destruction, economic ruin. Yet, nowadays, not even Vladimir Putin would dream of asking an audience of Russians whether they prefer butter or missiles, since he knows that – notwithstanding the rhetoric of Holy Mother Russia – they would vote unanimously for buttered toast. Nor would any Western leader run the risk of consulting their citizens on such a ‘ridiculous alternative’, aware that foreign policy decisions are best kept out of public hands.

Today, of course, the choice of missiles and drones is a given. It’s even considered morally indispensable – a ‘humanitarian necessity’. NATO has officially sent Ukraine more than a thousand tanks and over two million rounds of ammunition (but really it’s much more than this). And the Russian army, in turn, has mustered an equivalent level of armaments. Once the logic of rearmament is triggered, the Thatcherite maxim concerning finance capitalism rings just as true: ‘there is no alternative’.

Even a cursory analysis shows the profundity of the gap separating 1938 from the present period. In the interwar years, phrases like ‘mercanti di cannoni’, or ‘death merchants’, were used to describe those who reap the spoils of war. Now such terms are virtually banned from public discussion. The fact that there are people profiting from mass slaughter has been expunged from our political consciousness. Not even the most lucid and disenchanted commentator would dare affirm, as Anatole France did in 1922, that ‘We think we are dying for our country; we are dying for the industrialists’.

To be sure, the peace movement still denounces increased arms sales. In 2022, the world spent $2.24 trillion on arms, 39% of which was accounted for by the United States, 13% by China, 3.9% by Russia, 3.6% by India and 3.3% by Saudi Arabia. NATO members made up 55% of the global total. Peace activists have responded to such figures by pointing out that the total spent on arms could be used to solve more urgent problems: ‘With $25 billion we could resolve the most serious humanitarian crises around the world, with $100 billion we could mount an efficient offensive to the global climate crisis, and with $200 billion we could reach all of the UN’s Sustainable Development goals’.

Yet, although their arguments may be the same, the tone and rhetoric of the anti-war movement has shifted. Addressing International League of Peace Fighters in 1932, Anne Capy began by giving a much more concrete tabulation of war expenditure following WWI:

With the money the war cost, we could have provided a house worth 75,000 francs to every family in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium and Russia. We could even have fitted these houses with furniture worth up to 25,000 francs, and provided an advance of 100,000 francs to every family. There would still have been enough money to give each city of 200,000 inhabitants of the abovementioned countries 125 million for libraries, 125 million for hospitals and 125 million for universities. And there would still have remained a sum of capital which, placed at 5%, would have permitted to pay 125,000 schoolteachers and 125,000 nurses 25,000 francs per year.

She went on to denounce the ‘parasitic, international super-capitalism which dominates nations and has for years directed a great dance of speculation, governing behind governments reduced to the role of puppets’. It is hard to imagine such words being uttered today. Whereas Capy and her contemporaries had a clear critique of the ‘international profiteers of nationalism’ (a phrase used by Francis Delaisi in his 1913 pamphlet Le Patriotisme des plaques blindées), their inheritors typically use a more sanitized parlance – one that revolves around ‘human rights’, ‘diplomacy’ and the ‘rules-based order’.  

Indeed, who among us is capable of naming even a single Western capitalist or Russian oligarch profiting from the slaughter in Ukraine? Even if we were able to identify a few, it would be highly unusual to label them ‘geniuses of destruction’ (the appellation once given to Gustav Krupp), nor would we speak of the ‘Jackal International’, as Mil Zankin did in his 1933 pamphlet L’Internationale des charognards: Les marchands de canons veulent la guerre. Nowadays, it would be atypical to refer to an arms dealer in the following terms:

Sir Basil Zaharoff, the passion of whose declining years is orchid culture, would probably not be aghast at the suggestion that he was the greatest murderer the world has even known. He has heard it too often. And he may even enjoy the irony of his gifts (they took a few millions out of the hundreds of millions he made from the World War) for hospitalization of the ‘War wounded’.

This portrait of Zaharoff, then the world’s most powerful weapons magnate, wasn’t penned by an angry pacifist, but by an impeccably mainstream journalist for Fortune. The publication, founded in 1929 by Henry Luce, described itself as an ‘Ideal Super-Class Magazine’, a ‘luxury’ mouthpiece of American capitalism sold for a dollar a copy (equivalent to $16 today). In 1934 it published an unsigned dossier, ‘Arms and Men’, with the lengthy subtitle, ‘A primer on Europe’s armament makers; their mines, their smelters, their banks, their holding companies, their ability to supply everything you need for a war from cannons to the casus belli; their axioms, which are (a) prolong war, (b) disturb peace.’ Reproduced by Reader’s Digest, and later published as a pamphlet, the essay travelled widely. Its opening paragraph is striking, for it demonstrates how the capitalist class of the 1930s exhibited attitudes that have since become unthinkable. Imagine if the Wall Street Journal or Forbes began an article like this:

According to the best accountancy figures, it cost about $25,000 to kill a soldier during the World War. There is one class of Big Business Men in Europe that never rose up to denounce the extravagance of its governments in this regard – to point out that when death is left unhampered as an enterprise for the individual initiative of gangsters the cost of single killing seldom exceeds $100. The reason for the silence of these Big Business Men is quite simple: the killing is their business. Armaments are their stock in trade; governments are their customers; the ultimate consumers of their products are: historically, almost as often their compatriots as their enemies. That does not matter. The important point is that every time a burst shell fragment finds its way into the brain, the heart, or the intestines of a man in the front line, a great part of the $25,000 much of it profit, finds its way into the pocket of the armament maker.

It isn’t that this unofficial spokesman of American capital woke up one morning with the pressing urge to denounce the European war industry (its US counterpart only got a cursory mention). It was rather that a national campaign was already underway, culminating in a Senate Committee tasked with investigating the ‘manufacturing and sale of munitions and the economic circumstances of US entry into World War I’. The Democratic majority in the Senate elected Gerald Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, as chairman – responsible for overseeing a total of 93 hearings. Predictably, although the investigation ‘produced a sordid report of intrigues and bribery; of collusion and excessive profits; of war scares artificially fostered’ and disarmament conferences ‘deliberately wrecked’, its ultimate impact was nil. It fulfilled the usual function of such inquiries: to brush the issue under the rug.

A few years later, it wasn’t just Mussolini and his supporters who chose guns over butter; the whole world followed suit. Thus, for all the sympathy and nostalgia that the anti-war movement of the 1930s may arouse today, there are two things worth noting about its trajectory: it was entirely inefficacious, and – as we shall see – most if not all of its arguments have been rendered outdated by our new political-economic conjuncture.

In the erstwhile discourse of pacifism, the ‘merchants of death’ were often presented as occult forces. As the Fortune piece asserted:

. . . without a shadow of doubt there is at the moment in Europe a huge and subversive force that lies behind the arming and counterarming of nations: there are mines, smelters, armament works, holding companies, and banks, entangled in an international embrace, yet working inevitably for the destruction of such little internationalism as the world has achieved so far. The control of these myriad companies vests, finally, in not more than a handful of men whose power, in some ways, reaches above the power of state itself.

This ‘handful of men’ whose power ‘reaches above the state’ were the same figures who, in Delaisi’s words, ‘specialise in manufacturing machines of war, concentrate on systematically corrupting the senior civil servants responsible for national defence, induce panic amongst an easily-excitable public opinion with loud press campaigns, exert pressure on legislatures to raise funds for lucrative orders and, by playing on patriotism as a dividend machine, entrench the odious regime of “armed peace” when not launching bloody conflicts directly.’ This image of puppet-masters pulling the strings of governments belonged to the era of magnate capitalism. But this regime was superseded by a distinct form of managerial capitalism at the turn of the Second World War. At that point, ‘death merchants’ were displaced by the ‘military-industrial complex’.

It was the American sociologist C. Wright Mills who, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, argued that a new oligarchy had consolidated itself, constituted by economic, political and military elites whose roles were increasingly integrated and intertwined. Politicians, Mills wrote, were no longer puppets controlled by industrialists and bankers, a ‘committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. They had been subsumed into the elite itself, and formed an essential element of its power structure – capable of shaping it and being shaped by it. The idea of a ‘military-industrial complex’, however, was most memorably conveyed by Dwight Eisenhower in his famous farewell message on 17 January 1961. ‘In the councils of government’, he declared, ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.’

From then on, talk of ‘death merchants’ was limited to shady figures who trafficked arms to Third World states and terrorist militias. World powers, on the other hand, could comfortably rely on their military-industrial complexes. Like snakes changing their skin, this moulting from death merchants to military-industrial functionaries had the effect of anonymizing the warmongers. Real-life people – who could in theory be named and shamed – were supplanted by an impersonal bureaucratic structure. The ‘complex’ saved them from accountability.

These days, if there’s a scarcity of munitions, arms producers will ask for assurances from governments before building new factories, as they don’t want to be stuck with idle factories once the war is over. The military-industrial complex therefore serves not only to produce armaments for the military, but also to guarantee that industrialists won’t find themselves with stranded assets. The constant interchange between the arms industry and the upper echelons of public life is best described through the metaphor of the ‘revolving door’; or, perhaps, the more expressive French term pantouflage: i.e., senior public officials (civil servants, cabinet ministers, generals) who become managers of private companies and vice versa. The current Italian Defence Minister, for instance, previously worked for the Leonardo group, a leader in the Italian armament sector, and served as president of the Federation of Italian Companies for Aerospace, Defence and Security.  

In the twenty-first-century imaginary, death merchants have been replaced with drug traffickers, as demonstrated by the endless Hollywood films in which the antagonist is a shady dealer in pills and powders. This represents an extraordinary act of misdirection, given that the global war industry employs more than 50 million workers and 500,000 scientists: a universe infinitely larger and more dangerous than that of drug pedalling. What’s more, the arms sector is now integrated into, and controlled by, the respected realm of finance. We now find great investment funds at the helm of arms companies. The same fund will invest in a chain of retirement homes in Germany, a lithium mine in Africa and a soy plantation in Brazil, as well as partnering with a multinational manufacturer of ‘suicide’ drones and buying equity in the US space industry. Everything is exchangeable, and therefore everything is permissible. For the investor, the anti-tank missile cannot be differentiated from the hospital bed, as both are bluntly characterised by their cost-benefit relationship, and hence subject to the same criterion of benchmarking.

Financialization of this sort has two primary effects. First, it stages the passage from the international to the global. A century ago, as Delaisi wrote, it was possible to identify a ‘Great International, long searched for by political idealists and working-class strategists, taking shape in the arms industry’. These were national figures operating according to an international logic; but now, in a striking inversion, we see transnational actors with global interests adapting themselves to national exigencies. Second, and perhaps even more insidiously, financialization has rendered all of us – the postman, the primary school teacher, the factory worker – shareholders (and thus, in a certain sense, both owners and profiteers) in the death industry. Since pensions have been privatized, our derisory retirement funds have to be invested, which means handing them over to corporations. Without knowing it, large swathes of the Western workforce have come to depend on the dividends of missiles launched in Ukraine. This may be an unconscious reason for the silence that surrounds the death merchants – a reticence that makes the indignation of the last century seem dated.  

Yet this doesn’t mean that, on at least a couple of points, we shouldn’t heed the old analysis of the arms industry. Fortune’s explanation of the ‘philosophy’ of the death merchants remains as relevant as ever: ‘Keep Europe in a constant state of nerves. Publish periodical war scares. Impress governmental officials with the vital necessity of maintaining armaments against the “aggressions” of neighbor states. Bribe as necessary. In every practical way create suspicion that security is threatened.’ In our current media landscape, these techniques still predominate – animating the nightly news coverage and shaping its parameters.

Moreover, the mutually reinforcing dynamic of arms sales is just as evident as it was in Delaisi’s time. ‘Under this strange system’, he wrote,

the war potential of a great country, or of a group of countries, is strengthened by the development of the adverse military power. The trade in arms is the only one in which the orders obtained by a competitor increase those of his rivals. The great armament firms of hostile powers oppose one another like pillars supporting the same arch. And the opposition of their governments makes their common prosperity.

This is why, as the Russian war machine experiences an unprecedented boom, its Western counterparts are also rejoicing. In the UK, BAE Systems has increased its revenues by 9% and seen its orders expand from £21,458 to £37,093 billion. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Germany’s principal defence provider, Rheinmetall, experienced a similar surge in orders, sending its revenue to €6.4 billion, inflating its profits by 61% and more than doubling the value of its stock. Even in a country like Italy, which has provided Ukraine with precious few weapons, the Leonardo group can boast of a 30% increase in orders, especially from allied states that need to replenish their arsenals.

As such, the idea that the great armament industries of hostile countries constitute pillars holding up the same arch – that the antagonism between their governments produces their common prosperity – is not so far-fetched. As ever, patriotism continues to function as a ‘dividend machine’.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Edward Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism’, NLR I/121.

He’s not as rich as Jeff Bezos, not a social media star like Elon Musk, nor an icon like Bill Gates. Yet he is the most interesting of the Silicon Valley tycoons, for more than any other he embodies the new breed of capitalist ideologue. Rather than using politics to make money, he uses his billions for politics, in the hope of emancipating the rich from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by the workers’. Peter Thiel (b. 1967): German by birth, American and South African by upbringing; according to Forbes, he is worth $4.2 billion. Equipped, in contrast to his peers, with a degree in philosophy and a doctorate in law, he likes to affect the posture of a philosopher king. In his most ambitious piece of writing, The Straussian Moment (2004), he sketches a kind of Geistes Weltgeschichte in light of 9/11, citing with carefully cultivated intellectual effrontery Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Pierre Manent, Roberto Calasso, and name-checking Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kojève.

Ever since his university days, Thiel has been devoted to a kind of impudence of position, always embracing the most conservative one possible (he has been an admirer of Reagan since high school). According to his biographer Max Chafkin, Thiel felt that ‘mainstream liberals had accepted communists, but conservatives were unable to bring themselves to associate with members of the far-right…He really wished the right would become more like the left’. Enrolling at Stanford, the most reactionary of the top-tier universities, Thiel spent his time railing against what he saw as the institution’s endemic leftism, co-founding the Stanford Review with the blessing of conservative guru Irving Kristol and financial backing via the Olin Foundation (a key entity in funding and organizing the neoliberal counteroffensive, as documented in my forthcoming book, Masters: The Invisible War of the Powerful Against their Subjects). It campaigned against multiculturalism, political correctness and homosexuality. Its editorial board was composed exclusively of men.

On LGBT rights, the review claimed that ‘the real scourge was homophobia-phobia, that is, fear of being labelled a homophobe… anti-gay bias should be rebranded “miso-sodomy” – hatred of anal sex – to focus on “deviant sexual practices”’. According to The Economist, the article ‘even defended a fellow law student, Keith Rabois, who decided to test the limits of free speech on campus by standing outside a teacher’s residence and shouting “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!”’. (Rabois would later become one of Thiel’s closest business partners.) Thiel went on to co-author The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (1995), published by a right-wing think tank, the Independent Institute, thanks again to a grant from the Olin Foundation. Formidable chess player that he is (a ‘Life Master’), Thiel already understood that to fight the battle of ideas effectively, adequate funding was required. He complained that ‘only one in four Stanford alumni were millionaires’ – further proof, in his eyes, of the uselessness of the traditional academic curriculum.

Following brief stints as a lawyer and derivatives trader at Credit Suisse, Thiel returned to California in 1998 and established his own investment fund, Thiel Capital Management, with $1 million raised thanks to ‘friends and family’ (in all the biographies this episode is vague; as we know, the first million is always the hardest). The turning point came in 1999, when Thiel founded PayPal with a group of friends (thanks especially to Max Levchin, a Ukrainian-born cryptographer who thought up the basic algorithm for the system of online payments). This economic venture claimed an ideological motivation: ‘The driving ideal of PayPal’, he wrote, was to create ‘a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution – the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were’. The so-called PayPal mafia was formed: a famous photo depicts the audacious youths (all men) dressed as Italian-American mobsters of the prohibition era. Six would become billionaires. It’s notable that three had a past in apartheid South Africa: Thiel, Musk and Roelof Botha, PayPal’s CFO, later partner at the investment fund Sequoia. Thiel has a difficult relationship with Musk: amongst other things, he removed him as CEO of PayPal when the latter was on his honeymoon.

Thiel made $55 million from PayPal in 2002, launching him into the world of venture capital. The list of companies he has invested is extensive (Airbnb, Asana, LinkedIn, Lyft, Spotify, Twilio, Yelp, Zynga). His fame as a far-sighted capitalist was cemented in 2004 when, as the first external investor, he gave (a mere) $500,000 to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for 10.2% of Facebook’s shares, earning him over a billion dollars. If instead of realizing his stake, however, he had participated in Facebook’s recapitalization, he would now have around $60 billion. This hasn’t been his only mistake. In 2004 he refused to invest in Tesla and YouTube (both founded by ex-members of the PayPal mafia). In 2006, when Musk needed funds to develop Tesla’s electric cars, Thiel passed on the opportunity – a costly choice, given capitalization surpassed $2 billion in 2010 and peaked at $1,061 billion in 2021, a growth of 50,000% (by April 2023 this had dropped back to $584 billion, but still represents a rise of almost 30,000%). Musk put Thiel’s refusal down to ideological reasons: ‘he doesn’t quite fully buy into the climate change thing’.

What does Thiel buy into? Between 2004 and 2014 he busily expounded his world-view at conferences; in articles for the Wall Street Journal; in The Straussian Moment; essays such as ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009) for the Cato Institute (a think tank financed by the Koch brothers) and ‘The End of the Future’ for the National Review; another book entitled Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) based on a course he taught at Stanford. (This was co-authored with one of his students, Blake Masters, later chief operating officer of Thiel’s investment firm, Thiel Capital, and president of the Thiel Foundation; in 2022 Thiel generously supported his failed campaign for the United States Senate).

In a typical move, Thiel often presents himself and his allies as victims. Just like the French who claim to be victims of North Africans, or Israelis who say the same of Palestinians, the rich are bullied by the poor. Like any reactionary, his is also a tale of decadence. For Thiel, we are in full-blown cultural decline, ‘ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment’. The cause is democracy, in particular its extension to women and the poor (note the association between the two): ‘The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.’

Enlarging the franchise is said to have hindered the technological and scientific progress which in the past permitted the generalization of a certain quality of life, even to those who didn’t deserve it. Since the 1970s – with the exception of the tech industry – this has stalled, with no great innovation registered in transport, energy or even medicine. Thiel concludes that progress is ‘rare’ in human history (perhaps not as rare as he thinks; the invention of the keel for watercraft seemed inconsequential in the medieval period, but it eventually made oceanic navigation possible). His solution: we must return to some kind of monarchical regime, because history’s great inventions have all been produced by companies (or startups) which function as absolute monarchies, or monopolies.

Thiel’s publicity efforts are often dedicated to extolling the parallel virtues of monarchy and monopoly: ‘Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today’s margins that it can’t possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits’. In a typical intervention for the Wall Street Journal, ‘Competition is for Losers’, he argues that competition produces copies or improvements of what already exists, but never true novelty – a fact that leads him to argue that ‘actually, capitalism and competition are opposites’.

It feels almost futile to note the logical inconsistencies of these arguments. Thiel maintains that progress is rare in human history, yet absolute monarchies have been the norm, from which one can only deduce that absolute monarchies have seldom generated progress. Monopolies don’t come from nowhere but arise precisely when a firm beats its competitors. One might in fact say that in an unregulated market monopoly is an inevitable result of competition: competing implies winners and losers, and as the winner is increasingly successful it becomes easier for them to dominate. This is why in the proto-history of capitalism of every country, we see the emergence of monopolies. To avoid their formation, it has always been necessary for states to implement anti-trust laws. Moreover, as soon as they’re established, monopolies cease to innovate and tend to live off rentierism. 

There is an even more fundamental contradiction here. How can someone declare themselves a libertarian yet support absolute monarchy? Whose freedom is he talking about? How many monopolies can the world accommodate? Freedom for the very few, slavery for the vast majority is the destination. Many have discussed the influence of Nietzsche on Thiel’s thinking, but perhaps the more precise reference is Max Stirner. Not for nothing, in Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) the ‘Unique’ or ‘Ego’ is defined by its ‘property’, and may use any means – fraud, deception – to realize its power. For Stirner also, free competition is a limitation on freedom, given that it can only be ensured by a state which begets servitude. How can one be against the tyranny of the state and in favour of absolute monarchy: the most despotic, intrusive and arbitrary kind of state? The answer is Stirner’s notion of the absolute instrumentality of every position. The Unique can say anything it likes if it is useful to him. Thiel has been accused of inconsistency and self-contradiction, but he is merely putting this Stirnean strategy into practice.

One example. Thiel spends his time denigrating Stanford and higher education in general (even financing, with much fanfare, a foundation for students who abandoned university to found their own startups – with extremely limited results). But he then paid money to teach a course at that very same university, which in turn allowed him to publish a best-selling book legitimated by the Stanford brand (the true number of copies sold remains uncertain: a million, a million and a half, even three million according to various claims, but the real number could be much lower). Another: Thiel spent his youth berating gay people only to come out in 2016, marrying a man and simultaneously admitting to a romantic relationship with a male model. If the ostentatious homophobia of his time as a student can be attributed in part to an anti-PC, anti-diversity crusade, it’s less clear why Thiel would bring a lawsuit against the website Gawker for outing him in 2011. The explanation offered by his biographer is that amongst the major investors in Theil’s capital venture are ‘Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime’.

This libertarian advocate for absolute monarchy also has no qualms about making money through mass surveillance. In 2003, he founded Palantir, which specializes in big data analysis and immediately received funding from the CIA’s investment fund, In-Q-Tel. Contradiction? In The Straussian Moment, just as he founded Palantir, Thiel wrote: ‘Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.’ Echelon is the most intrusive planetary surveillance mechanism yet devised in human history.

Palantir floundered until in 2011 a rumour began circulating that the company had ‘helped kill Osama’. From then on, contracts abounded, with the German police even seeking its services, which include not only software but also the manpower to use it (the Germans have now changed their minds and want to rescind on the deal). A paradox of capitalist profitability, Palantir is valued at $17.6 billion – without ever generating profits – and today forms the most substantial part of Thiel’s fortune. On the one hand, this libertarian makes his money helping the state spy on people; on the other, he promotes Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as instruments of emancipation from the tyranny of states (as I discussed in a previous article for Sidecar). This is not a question of incoherence or contradiction: it is pure and simple cynicism. Even his self-image as a ‘contrarian’ is part of the game, the goal being to present himself as an oppressed minority, an outsider, an underdog, an anticonformist. But what kind of anticonformism is it to wish to become rich and powerful? Even the defence of monopoly is perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist: think of the rehabilitation of monopoly by the neoliberals, the veritable ‘revolution in corporate law’ guided by Henry Manne. 

To be sure, this total lack of scruples recalls the attitude of the Nietzschean Übermensch, for whom everything is permissible – to be a libertarian and simultaneously flirt with Opus Dei, participate in the Bilderberg Group, fund Steve Bannon, become for a time Donald Trump’s sponsor in Silicon Valley then standard-bearer for a Trumpism without Trump and finally a promoter of the New Right. (Thiel’s jeremiad against political correctness echoes Nietzsche’s lament in On the Genealogy of Morality about the revolt of slave morality: ‘the higher man is liquidated, the morality of the common man emerges victorious’.) His desire is to oversee a permanent secession not of the plebs from the patriciate, as occurred in ancient Rome (as in the fable of Menenius Agrippa) but of the patriciate from the plebs. Hence the acquisition of a 477-acre estate in New Zealand, and his financing of Seasteading, a project for a self-sufficient community located far out in international waters, which after serious mishaps reduced its ambitions to operating 15 miles from the coast, only to then be shelved entirely. This separatist impulse is also present in his investment in Space-X with Elon Musk: Thiel is far less tepid about the idea of isolating himself in space than ‘the climate change thing’.

Yet the question arises: to what end? The price of nihilism is the meaninglessness of life itself, of one’s own troubles, of wanting to go to one’s grave loaded with gold. It’s no surprise that fear of death seems to be a dominant motivation. It reminds one of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), in which a knight plays his final game of chess against death. This consummate chess player believes death is ‘nothing but a bug in the feature set of mankind, and one he can buy his way out of’. This is why he throws bags of money at ventures such as Halcyon Molecular, Emerald Therapeutics, Unity Biotechnology, Methuselah Foundation, financing start-ups which promise to lengthen life to at least 120 years, the definitive cure for Alzheimer’s and so on. And if all this doesn’t work, he’s ready to have his brain frozen and wait for his reincarnation once technology makes it possible. (He’s not the only billionaire hoping to outsmart death; Jeff Bezos and Larry Page both fund the Alcor Life Extension Foundation ‘which has been freezing bodies and brains of the dead since 1970’.)

The contempt Thiel nurtures towards the rest of humanity must be almost equal to that which he appears to harbour towards the female gender, if he believes us slaves to be so masochistically inclined as to be ready to accept his morality. If he succeeds, he would be the first political activist to win over his audience not by promising anything in particular, but by guaranteeing hell as the only future we – the herd – deserve. The name that has been coined for this new manifestation of global capitalism is truly appropriate: the Dark Enlightenment. Switching off the lights is indeed the inevitable result.

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Celebrity Thaumaturge’, NLR 74.

In the first two hundred days of 2022, Taylor Swift’s private jet made 170 flights, covering an average distance of 133 miles. It emitted 8,293 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the process. By way of comparison, the average annual carbon footprint for a US citizen is 14.2 tonnes. In Europe it is 6.8, in Africa 1.04. Swift’s jet, in other words, has a carbon footprint equal to 1,603 Americans, 2,225 Europeans and 14,552 Africans.

None of us would consider taking a plane to travel 133 miles. But evidently, we live in a world apart from the likes of Kylie Jenner – sister of Kim Kardashian – who is apparently partial to taking 12 minute flights. One wonders about the mental processes that govern such decisions, or those that led her to post on Instagram a black-and-white photograph of herself and her partner kissing in front of two private jets, captioned: ‘You wanna take mine or yours?’ It’s dispiriting to see that their uncertainty is seemingly no different from that of children deciding which scooter to ride. But the 7 million plus people who liked the post – evidently dreaming of owning a pair of jets themselves – inspire even more despair.

The dream of everyone having their own private aircraft – every man an Icarus – has been a figment of the Western imagination since before air travel even existed. See, for example, this French illustration from 1890 of a graceful lady with hat and parasol on her flying taxi-carriage: 

Just as the carriage, once the preserve of ‘gentlemen’, became available to all classes once it was mechanical and motor-powered, so too the aeroplane would one day become a personal form of travel, whizzing along the boulevards of the sky. An American illustration from 1931 already exhibited the idea of city parking for planes, even suggesting, perhaps in keeping with the ineffable Jenner, that a family may possess a number of them, just as they own multiple cars.

An unsustainable utopia: imagine a world with a few billion aircraft whirling around the sky. A few billion cars are already unbearable for the planet. But of course, it is the rarity of aircraft that makes them so desirable. There are 23,241 private jets in operation worldwide (as of August 2022), 63% of which are registered in North America. (The number of private aircraft as a whole is much greater; there are still 90,000 Pipers in operation, plus several other brands of private propeller planes).

Orders for new private jets are on the rise, even as calls to reduce CO2 emissions intensify. Beyond the opulent lifestyles of starlets and ephemeral idols, it is major corporations that are leading the charge. An Airbus Corporate Jet study found that 65% of the companies they interviewed now use private jets regularly for business. The pandemic caused this figure to skyrocket. Last year saw the highest jet sales on record. As one commentator noted: ‘According to the business aviation data firm WingX, the number of flights on business aircraft across the globe rose by 10% last year compared to 2021 – 14% higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The report lists more than 5.5 million business aircraft flights in 2022 – more than 50% higher than in 2020’.

While solemn international summits make plans for reducing emissions (along with the use of plastic, noxious chemicals and so on), elites are polluting away as if there were no tomorrow. Meanwhile, the poor fools down below busy themselves with sorting out their recycling. For our rulers, the question of whether it would be better to have an egg today or a chicken tomorrow is entirely rhetorical. Never in human history has a king, emperor, statesman or entrepreneur chosen the chicken: it is always and only the egg today, at the cost of exterminating the entire coop.

As Le Monde reports, the five largest oil companies posted ‘an unprecedented $153.5 billion (€143.1 billion) in net profits for 2022. The oil giants are approaching the total figure of $200 billion in adjusted net profit’ (i.e. excluding provisions and exceptional items), of which ‘$59.1 billion in adjusted earnings (+157%) for ExxonMobil (US); $36.5 billion (+134%) for Chevron (US); $27.7 billion (+116%) for BP (UK), despite a net loss of $2.5 billion linked to the Russian context; and $39.9 billion (+107%) for Shell (UK).’ Even the environmentally friendly Norwegian state pension fund, Equinor, will benefit from the bonanza: it posted ‘an adjusted net profit of $59.9 billion at the end of just the first nine months of 2022’.

The announcement of these record profits (which have not been taxed by any government) comes on the back of last year’s much-hyped COP27 conference in Sharm el Sheik, attended by as many as 70 executives from the fossil fuel industry. They will be gathering again for another no doubt portentous summit later this year, presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. (Naturally, a geopolitical emergency serves as a good excuse to delay the slightest environmental action: war in Ukraine has led even the ecologically-minded Germans to reopen their coal mines. Rather than prompting a shift away from natural gas, the war has sparked a frantic search for more of it. The pandemic likewise led to a vertiginous increase in plastic consumption, and if for a few months it helped reduce the emissions from road and air traffic, it dealt a far more serious blow to public transportation, now viewed with suspicion, as a site of infection and contagion.)

It is as if global elites weren’t just mocking the rest of humanity, but the planet itself – poisoning it with one hand while greenwashing with the other. The Italian oil company Eni has as its symbol a six-legged dog, formerly black, now green, thus assuring us of their environmental bonafides. ‘Investment firms have been capturing trillions of dollars from retail investors, pension funds, and others’, Bloomberg writes,

with promises that the stocks and bonds of big companies can yield tidy returns while also helping to save the planet or make life better for its people. The sale of these investments is now the fastest-growing segment of the global financial-services industry, thanks to marketing built on dire warnings about the climate crisis, wide-scale social unrest, and the pandemic.

Wall Street now rates the environmental and social responsibility of business governance, though Bloomberg rightly points out that ESG scores ‘don’t measure a company’s impact on the earth and society’, but rather ‘gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders’. That is to say, they are not intended to help protect the environment from the companies, but the companies from the environment. ‘McDonald’s Corp., one of the world’s largest beef purchasers, generated more greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 than Portugal or Hungary, because of the company’s supply chain. McDonald’s produced 54 million tons of emissions that year, an increase of about 7% in four years.’ Yet in 2021 McDonald’s saw its ESG score upgraded, thanks to the ‘company’s environmental practices’.

The elites are fond of dangling a grass-coloured future in front of us – deodorized, disinfected and depolluted thanks to biofuels and electric cars. But to produce sufficient biofuel we’d have to cover the earth with soy plantations, definitively deforesting the planet (not to mention the production of fertilisers, pesticides and agricultural machinery). As for the electric car, whilst it pollutes less than its petrol-powered equivalent when used, it actually creates far more pollution to produce one. According to one professor at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Energy Technology, manufacturing an electric car emits as much CO2 as driving 170,000km in a regular car. And this is before the electric car’s engine is even turned on. As one academic study concluded:

the electric cars appear to involve higher life cycle impacts for acidification, human toxicity, particulate matter, photochemical ozone formation and resource depletion. The main reason for this is the notable environmental burdens of the manufacturing phase, mainly due to toxicological impacts strictly connected with the extraction of precious metals as well as the production of chemicals for battery production.

This is without even counting the fact that the electricity used to drive the car will benefit the environment only if it’s produced by clean and renewable sources. At best, the electric car is a mere palliative: the problem is not so much having billions of non-polluting cars, but producing billions of cars in the first place (in addition to the necessary infrastructure).

The elites are fooling the world, but they’re also fooling themselves. They believe they can poison the planet with impunity but save themselves by escaping to recently-acquired estates in New Zealand, far from all the smog and radiation, or else to Mars or some other extra-terrestrial refuge. Infantile dreams, cartoon utopias. One wonders what right they have to proclaim themselves elites in the first place. In the original French, ‘troupe d’élite’ denoted a superior stratum. The term was popularized in postwar sociology by C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite (1956), essentially as a modern synonym for the classical ‘oligarchy’. After the sixties, it fell out of fashion, until reappearing again in the 1990s.

In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), Christopher Lasch wrote that what characterized the new elites was their hatred of the vulgar masses:

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing.

(Note how the fortunes of the term ‘elite’ have gone hand-in-hand with those of ‘populism’, wielded as a pejorative).

Lasch defined the elite in intellectual terms, thereby opening the way for the problematic concept of the ‘cognitive elite’. The champion of the term was Charles Murray, who together with Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), a book whose essential claim is that black people are more stupid than white people. (In a subsequent conversation with the New York Times, aided by a significant amount of alcohol, Murray summarised his life’s work as ‘social pornography’.) Its introduction claims that ‘modern societies identify the brightest youths with ever increasing efficiency and then guide them into fairly narrow educational and occupational channels. These channels are increasingly lucrative and influential, leading to the development of a distinct band in the social hierarchy, dubbed the ‘cognitive elite’.

Those who govern today’s world consider themselves part of this enlightened set. The legitimacy of their power is based on their supposed intellectual superiority. This is meritocracy in reverse. Rather than ‘They govern (or dominate) because they are better’, we have ‘They are better because they govern (or dominate)’. Weber had already caught onto this inversion in the early twentieth century:

When a man who is happy compares his position with that of one who is unhappy, he is not content with the fact of his happiness, but desires something more, namely the right to this happiness, the consciousness that he has earned his good fortune, in contrast to the unfortunate One who must equally have earned his misfortune. Our everyday experience proves that there exists just such a need for psychic comfort about the legitimacy or deservedness of one’s happiness, whether this involves political success, superior economic status, bodily health, success in the game of love, or anything else.

Given the social, environmental and geopolitical disasters which we are heading towards at breakneck speed, it is easy to doubt the claims of the elite to cognitive superiority. Yet perhaps it is not so much that they are dim, but rather that they are asleep at the wheel – and accelerating towards the precipice.

P.S. I must confess that before researching this article I did not know of the existence of Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner: it must be me, rather than the elites, who lives in a world apart.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Jacob Emery, ‘Art of the Industrial Trace’, NLR 71.