To be able to evolve, capitalism needed the legally free person who had the formal right to exercise economic choice. The creation of a class of persons cut free from the physical and ideological ties of feudalism or chattel slavery, to be able to sell their labour in a free market, always was an illusion, an ideological sleight of hand.
Such was the disparity in actual power, the only way an individual worker doing the selling could stand in any sort of equal relationship with the capitalist doing the buying, was to be in some sort of collective, i.e., to be in combination with others.
Those collectives enabled the sellers of labour to negotiate more equally with the buyers. This is why they always were and still are, hated and feared by the capitalist class, which will try to drive down labour costs by any means possible. (1)
Thus, the extension of the formal right to sell one’s labour, helped to create the modern individual and the notion of that individual's formal and social rights.
The strongest (2) of the working class collectives were eventually able to use the growing power of the modern state, which initially was the creation and servant of the capitalist class, to codify workers’ rights and to extend, and protect both individual and collective rights.
Trade unions, and other liberatory collectives, then sought to use the power of the modern state, to turn it into a force for wider social progress, or at least, to stop it from being an opponent to it.
This harnessing of the power of the state for social progress, reached its apogee in the decades after World War Two.
Internationally, there was the rise in the power of the Soviet bloc, China’s emergence as a communist controlled state, and a global surge in national liberation movements as peoples sought to gain freedom from their European colonial overlords.
Domestically, in the developed world, liberation movements ranged from women's, black and indigenous, gay and lesbian, and prisoners' rights, to the anti-psychiatry movement which sought to protect the rights of people with mental illness.
For a brief moment in time, in the affluent countries of the world, the people best placed to push past the essential iniquities and unsustainability of capitalism were diverted by the illusion of social democracy – the idea that the modern state could and would act to control capital.
Concessions made by the state ensured that too many of the people who were best placed to push for structural change, bought into the illusion that those concessions meant capitalism could be controlled, even be forced into being a benign force for social progress and justice.
The power of the myth of capitalist social democracy resides in the people who are wedded to it because they continue to benefit from it, materially and in term of status.
These people were and are not the most oppressed and hyper-exploited of the world – the mass for whom the era of post war Keynsianism brought far fewer real benefits, if any; they are the members of the ruling class’s buffer zone: the managers, the professionals, the academics, the career politicians, the technocrats and commentators – all those who keep the system running.
And to keep the system running, the most important thing they have to do, is to destroy the belief in any viable alternative.
Thus, a key clause in their compact with capital is to make the argument that communism is a greater enemy than fascism; that both are extremes which end in totalitarianism, and the only safe place is in the middle, huddled around what the ruling class declares to be the social and economic fulcrum point.
That the entire set of scales is owned and controlled by the same tiny, venal, power-obsessed, pathological elite it always was, is either not understood or is ignored.
The warning signs were posted when national liberation movements were derailed by overt and covert destabilisation and regime changes, and military action by the US and its allies even before WW2 had finally ended, and ramped up immediately after.
Any objective reading of history from the end of WW2 to the victory of global corporate finance capitalism with the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and the Warsaw Pact, shows there never was “peace”; and the blood-soaked foundations for the emergence of “neo-liberalism” had been laid much earlier than 1990.
The granting of social and legal concessions, important though they are in giving breathing space to oppressed peoples, was always, at base, in the service of the economic status quo.
The so-called neo-liberal era saw shifts in the way the capitalist class operates, from extremes of social and economic stratification, grossly ostentatious expressions of power and privilege, and European global domination exercised via settler and extractive colonialism, to the American empire’s apparently more democratic meritocracy, and its global domination via finance-based, neo-colonialism.
There has been a seventy year long heyday for the global buffer class in the form of a steady flow of extensions of formal rights, loosening of conservative traditions, and a widening of social acceptance of previously proscribed lifestyles.
Accompanying this was what rapidly built into a flood of various sorts of consumables, often useless, or quickly obsolete accoutrements signalling status, and serving as markers of progress for those in the coordinator class whose primary role is to convince people that an essentially predatory and unsustainable system works for the benefit of all.
The mass of easily repealed formal rights, the veneer of increased social acceptance, and the bribes of consumer baubles continue to help obscure the fact that the political, economic, and consumer choices available to the buffer class inside the imperial heartlands are denied to the bulk of the world’s population, and inside the belly of the beast itself, the distribution of wealth and power is grossly skewed.
In a real sense, US corporate capitalism is a leap back, slamming shut the small windows of opportunity that had been opened for a relatively select few after WW2.
To obscure the reality that for most people, the era's social freedoms, formal rights, and consumer choices are either a trompe l’oeil, or are highly conditional and proscribed, capitalism continues to create a mass of obfuscating ideologies.
These encourage people to be content with living vicariously via brief, curated glimpses of the lives of the rich and powerful. By dispensing latter day fairy stories, myths, and legends, they allow the mind at least to escape the often terrifying and ugly realities confronting us every day on the screens which now surround us.
It is in this wider context that via the alchemists of the medical-industrial complex, capitalism dangles the illusions of body-identity alignment, and attainment of, if not eternal, at least an extended youth.
In the context of all this and a growing right-wing backlash, such things as a declaration of a state of emergency about the rights of the LGBT+ community, by the US Human Rights Campaign, may well be warranted.
It’s both tragic and ironic that in pursuit of their political aims, so much hyperbolic rhetoric and catastrophising was deployed by gender identity lobbyists and activists, many people are either no longer listening, do not believe it, or do not care.
Most worrying, is the fact that some people are now in the grip of payback fever, a virulent contagion which can lead to otherwise sensible and decent people committing atrocities, or allowing them to be committed by others.
Some of us have long predicted a strong right-wing and socially conservative backlash against "radical transgenderism", which, if it gains enough momentum, could sweep away everything from such advances as women's reproductive and employment rights, no fault divorce, and criminalisation of marital rape, to the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and equalisation of marriage rights - i.e., an entire gamut of formal rights and the accompanying shifts in social acceptance.
The target of the right-wing backlash is not just trans people but everything that the growing ultra-conservative coalition includes in its definition of "gender ideology", i.e., any social shifts and formal rights it sees as destructive of the core tenets of familial patriarchy, and of wider androcentric and highly stratified forms of social organisation.
This is not just a resurgence of facets of male supremacy in wider society but a livening of its roots in patriarchal familial organisation – the man as head of a household based on religiously sanctioned, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, with women back in their divinely ordained and biologically proscribed place.
What the naifs, cowards, and payback merchants on the left/centre of Neo-liberalism (i.e., those who never had, or have given up on any hope of systemic change) failed to realise or to take account of is that we are living in an uncertain and volatile time –i.e., in a degree of wider social disequilibrium that could rapidly tip into chaos.
Inside the velvet glove of state granted formal rights to women and to marginalised minorities, and the heavily conditional support of a range of institutions, is the steel fist of neo-liberal corporate capitalism which has a death grip on the throat of the planet.
1. From the anti-combination acts, military action against strikers, depictions of unions as "the enemy within", entryism and use of agents provocateurs, buying off leaders, and the use of the "contract culture", capitalism demonstrates its implacable opposition to working class collectivism.
2. Numerically or by virtue of importance, to the enterprise, of the work being done.
