Translated by Alexey Spectre
Dear readers!
Everyone who’s interested have probably already seen the impressive parade of protest against the alleged new politics of the United States.
The Russian media mostly portray this parade in a simplified manner: “the American version of the Bolotnaya protests”: the riot of minorities and hipsters against the new leadership’s stated basic values.
But we think that this is a much wider phenomenon. And if you want to know how wide it can become, let’s talk about it.
First of all, we want to point out that the march didn’t only take place in the United States. There was also a big march in London. There were parades in Canada, in Denmark, in Berlin, Paris, Melbourne, Tokyo, Amsterdam, even in the South Africa and the Baltic States. This was reported in the American state-backed media, including Voice of America and Svoboda radio.
In other words, this confrontation isn’t limited to United States. It’s worldwide, or at least covers a large portion of the globe.
Strange barricades
Here’s the picture we see. The barricades that are being built now have divided the world’s citizens in a new, unique way. At one side, there are the direct descendants of the developed countries’ working class – the so-called lower middle class. They are workers, who, in a historically small period between 1945 and 2000, have ventured into the world of prosperity. And on the same side, there are direct descendants of classical exploiters: all those construction business moguls and oil barons; they seemed to have integrated into the “new supranational elite”, but have now rebelled.
On the other side, there is that supranational elite, the “one-percenters”. The Elysium from the movie of the same name, hanging over the planet at an unreachable height. A powerful crowd that possesses one half of world’s wealth, but obtains it not from the crude matter, but from something technologically advanced: from stock market speculations, software, media, social networks.
This crowd, of course, can’t escape the crude reality completely. Smartphones are smartphones, but the world still extracts oil, lives in houses (of various levels of comfort) and eats burgers.
This crowd have developed a global ideology to work with the world, possibly the only current global ideology: the so-called liberal globalism.
In short, the liberal globalization is about free (for the one-percenters) movement of capital, goods, production and workforce in the entire world. Furthermore, it’s also about transformation: in the ideal globalized world, there’s no permanent commodities, no permanent occupations, no permanent investments. The ideal commodity of this world is, metaphorically speaking, the constantly changing World of Warcraft, which has only one permanent attribute: the number of subscribers. The ideal worker is also transforming constantly: today, it’s a waiter, tomorrow, a mobile operator clerk, after tomorrow – a tablet PC repairman, and a beauty blogger in the spare time, in other words – anyone in demand, if learning courses are available.
This ideology is at war with both classical states and traditional classes, which are historically inert and slow the globalization down because of that.
And so the crowd that preaches this ideology set out to erase national borders and traditional social institutions such as clumsy large political parties, trade unions, etc.
But to compensate for that, the one-percenters have created their own supranational surrogate of the “vox populi”.
Fake proletariat
The “new proletariat” (probably accidentally) formed from people who thought of themselves as oppressed by society. This is very important: the oppressed elements were, more or less, plucked from the society and then set off on the society itself, within the framework of fighting for the rights.
Those are the “globalized people’s masses” - the lower-class people who allied with the supranational elite. This new proletariat received hefty bonuses. Leaders and activists received teaching grants and seats in various committees and funds. Bards and chroniclers got financial and information support. The ordinary fake proletarians received direct and indirect benefits and the things produced by the first two categories: mass propaganda and mass culture.
Why do we call this proletariat a fake one? Because it had never opposed the super-elite. They have never questioned the basic inequality of opportunity. They have only fought against the “secondary” inequality: gender, sexual, racial, the only result being the “right of oppressed minorities to get some privileged handouts.
America occupied
The place of the United States in this global supranational empire is curious. Here in Russia, back when the idea of the “golden billion” was still a thing, we thought that America was the metropolitan state of this new empire. But the history showed us that it was only the first province subjugated by the elite, their foothold and their expansionist tool. The United States, of course, had the richest fake proletariat, but, as the latest election showed, this wasn’t enough.
The weakest spot of the fake proletariat is that they only can act if they’re supported by sponsors, either directly or indirectly. As soon as sponsors pull out, the fake proletariat becomes marginalized again and decreases greatly in size. The most direct proof for that is the fate of the Russian “Bolotnaya” movement. They have dissipated – not because of any repressions (there weren’t any), just because of the ongoing economic crisis.
After the United States declared their independence from global imperialism, the American fake proletariat is now threatened by a similar lack of resources. America has decided to concentrate on self-repair – at least that’s what they say.
The upheaval is inevitable
We must add that the rebels – the rich “nationalists” and the impoverished workers who voted for them – also have their weaknesses.
It may sound strange, but their weakness is precisely their lack of global ideas. Their alliance is based on the rebellious elite’s promise to return the workers into the middle class, give them back their jobs and their prosperity.
But the thing is, they can only fulfill their promise by destroying the global supranational empire. By dissecting it into “economic worlds” with their own metropolises and peripheries. By filling their own countries with “development projects” and annulling the global ones.
All this can lead to such a laundry list of both international and internal battles (not necessarily, but quite probably) that the globalists’ bloody wars of 1990s – 2010s might seem an innocent game.
In a sense, it would be a “global independence war”. But in the same time, it would consist of new colonial wars that most probably won’t pass Russia by.