The West and the beautiful armouress

toni solo, November 3rd 2014

Over two thousand ago, in 146 BC, another once dominant but rotten ancien regime, Carthage, was destroyed. Carthage was wealthy but uncompetitive relative to its rivals. Its ruling class depended on mercenaries to fight their wars. The idols they worshipped gave them no convincing moral authority over their subjects. As their power declined, their vassals deserted and, finally, the Romans annihilated them. Barely 500 years later the Christian emperor Constantine, ruling from what is now Istanbul, briefly reunited the divided Roman empire before its ultimate collapse.

For medieval Europe the respective falls of the classical ancient powers, Persia, Athens, Carthage and Rome, were powerful moral tales spawning literary motifs that still grip the Western imagination. The West's true poet laureate is neither Shakespeare, Dante nor Goethe but the low-life criminal outcast, François Villon, whose lament of the no longer Beautiful Armouress is very much a metaphor for the phony politicians, news media charlatans and vapid celebrities currently dominating Western public life. Where are they now? The Fall of Kings. Lady Luck and The Wheel of Fortune. The Dance of Death.

Those motifs of Europe's mediaeval feudal civilization are essential emotional references of the Western nations' contemporary economic and political subjugation to the ever more obviously fascist alliance of Western corporate and political power. North American and European power elites have always rigged electoral democracy so as to evade democratic accountability. When they have been unable to repress demands for more liberal social and economic policy at home, they have protected their material advantages by trying to externalize the cost of Western liberties more fiercely onto their colonial and neocolonial victims overseas.

Few other explanations make plausible sense of the Western elites' increasingly unbalanced domestic repression and vicious overseas military aggression. In North America and Europe, domestic economic policy has effectively handed regulation and planning over to corporate elites so as to deepen the extraction of wealth from their vulnerable populations in the absurd disguise of policies promoting free markets.  In foreign policy, Western intellectual alibis cover up the deep continuity of new Western crimes against humanity designed to prolong the Western élites' historic cumulative advantage, derived from centuries of genocide, slavery and imperialist conquest.

All those economc and cultural policy exercises leave the essential genocidal criminality of European and North American societies firmly intact.  In contemporary US politics, maintaining the dominance of that elite criminality and co-opting hog-tied electorates involves a bitter internal elite conflict. In broad terms, the conflict pits the relatively pragmatic corporate elite network, fronted by people like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar against less flexible but equally predatory corporate policy rivals, including neoconservatives like Paul Singer, recently in the news leading the corporate financial attack on Argentina.

The conflict seems to be over the optimum policies, and their timing, necessary to sustain the global power and influence of corporate capitalism. Prominent recent expressions of this internal conflict, have been the furore over detailed revelations of  US and allied country mass surveillance, arguments over the US budget deficit and austerity in Europe and over the terms of major trade and sovereignty treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Treaty. The essential confict among the corporate elites is over how best to manage policy in order to sustain their ever more decrepit system of predatory barbarism enabling them to feed parasitically off everyone else's labour and productivity.

The Western elites bet they can maximize, or at the very least consolidate, their own advantage by co-opting sympathetic factions in other global elites - in China, South East Asia, Russia, India, Africa and Latin America -  who have also done well out of capitalism's systemic global injustice disguised as competition. Under a smart technological gloss, the West is in fact regressing back to dead hand feudalism. The once beautiful armouress remains wizened and unattractive even if she does now recite her lament over the Internet. Humanity's best defence lies in the socialist-inspired models of solidarity-based cooperation and complementarity currently transforming Latin America.