constraint to acquire its means of living ? Those who resort to violence today
to get their revenues, as the feudal lords did three hundred years ago, are, of
course, all state employees. They do not make money in exchange for a service
people find useful enough to pay for. State employees simply collect the means
they need through the use of violence, coercion, racket, taxes (all these words
being synonymous here). They form the new ruling class. We are the oppressed. So
it is obvious, my friends, that the class struggle is not over. We are still
face to face with our exploiters, class against class, The mystery is why this
exploitation by the ruling class of state employees and their lackeys is not
obvious to everyone. How come does it last, how come the vast majority of the
population does not become conscious of the oppression it is subjected to ?
For it is true that most people in Europe do not perceive taxation as robbery
and government-imposed regulations and controls as coercion. You meet people
nowadays who would take out a gun and shoot a youth who is stealing a cassette
player from their car, and these same people allow the taxman to walk away with
50% of what they earn, every month, year after year, during their entire
lifetime. Furthermore, when you assess how much you are robbed by the taxman, it
is not just what you pay today that you should take into account, but the
compounded value of all what you have paid since the VAT you incurred on your
first ever purchase and the income tax on your first salary, plus the
opportunity cost of all the projects and desires you could not fulfill with that
money because it was taken away from you. Try to figure out what these numbers
add up to for yourself, you?ll be staggered. The Ruling Class Now
the first answer to the question of why we allow ourselves to be exploited seems
to be that the dominant class does not appear to be the wealthiest in society,
and the fact is it is not. So how come they exploit us, if they don?t make
more money than the richest amongst us ? Some people in the new ruling
class may not be rich, it is true, but neither were many slave owners or feudal
lords. Many lived no better, even were much poorer, than commoners, who were
active in trade and other businesses. It is not the amount of wealth that makes
you a member of the ruling class, but the way this wealth, however modest, is
acquired. It is not how much you earn, but how you earn it, that qualifies
exploitation. Do you make your money by political means or economical means ?
Is it earned or is it extorted ? Madonna makes 1,000 times more money than
a secretary in the European Union Brussels bureaucracy, but no one is forced to
buy Madonna records or attend her concerts. Every single penny, therefore, that
Madonna gets is given to her, often enthusiastically, by her fans. Every single
penny the EU secretary gets in salary is extorted from taxpayers. I grant you
that some people who acquire their revenues through coercion may still render a
useful service. I am sure one finds learned professors in state universities and
dedicated practitioners in state hospitals. The feudal lord too offered the
services of justice, police and defense to his serfs, the official church
provided education and social services.. The question is : there is no way to
know how much these services offered by state employees are really worth : are
they rendered in an optimal fashion ? Do they correspond to the true needs
of the people ? Because you are not free to pay for them (and often the
provision of these services is a monopoly protected by law), no one can tell how
useful the service really is, how much of this service would be needed and at
what price. More importantly, the end never justifies the means. As Albert Camus
used to say : "A political assassination is not a political act, it is an
assassination"; likewise we may say : "Robbing the rich to assist the
poor is not assistance, it is robbery". You can test by yourself how useful
a profession is by the way you would like those engaged in it to practice it.
You want an airline pilot, a hairdresser, a lawyer, a cook, a prostitute?, to
be hard working, dedicated, and creative in their job, but now think of customs
officials. If you have to pay them at all, pay them for doing nothing, you would
get better value than paying them for interfering with your affairs. This is how
useful these exploiters are to society. I must confess that, among exploiters, I
nourish a special aversion for customs officials, and if I may make a pause
here, I would like to tell you a story. It is about this tourist who is visiting
a foreign city. He notices a shop, like that of an antique dealer, and a very
odd small statue of a cat in the window. The tourist walks in and asks for a
price. "The statue is only $100, says the antique dealer, but the story
that goes with the statue is $1,000". "I don?t need the story, the
tourist shrugs, I want to bring a souvenir home, and this statue will do just
fine." "I?ll sell it to you, but believe me, warns the antique
dealer, you?ll soon come back for the story". The tourist leaves the
shop, with the statue in his pocket. As he is returning to his hotel, he notices
a cat is following him. This is unusual. He looks back again, and now four cats
are on his tails, and soon twenty cats. The tourist realizes he cannot walk into
the hotel with a herd of cats behind him, so, as he was crossing a bridge, he
throws the statue into the river. Immediately, the whole army of cats jump from
the bridge into the water and drown. Flabbergasted by what happened, the tourist
pauses for a long moment ; then he takes a sudden decision and traces his steps
back to the shop. The antique dealer wears an indulgent smile : "I see you
are already coming back for the story." "No, replies the tourist, I
would like to buy a statue of a customs official." With the transformation
of society, the face of oppression changes to reflect different circumstances.
This is why we don?t readily recognize exploitation for what it is. For
instance, in most European countries, government bureaucrats are employed for
life. It is the rule in France. When a talented young Frenchman is recruited by
a state agency, the whole French society finds itself saddled with a legal
obligation of 7 to 10 million dollars towards this new employee. This is how
much it will cost society on average to fund this person?s useless activity
from the first pay-check through retirement and until she dies. This 7 to 10
million dollars is the capital the exploited class is forced to guarantee by law
each member of the state exploiters? class. And in France, there are more than
5 millions of them, some 20% of the active population. "Drowning By
Numbers?" This figure of about 20% of the active population, by the way,
is at the high end of the proportion of feudal lords and the official clergy to
the total population during medieval times. There seems to be a natural law that
prevents the ruling class from growing above that number of 20%. Ecology offers
us many examples of such a fixed ratio between exploiters and exploited, between
the number of predators and their preys. Wolves, for instance, feed on caribous.
When the wolves population increases, they kill off too many caribous ; they
start to go hungry, the weakest starve to death, and their total population
settles back to where it was. This analogy tells us there is no difference in
nature between socialism and social-democracy. The difference is only in degree.
In the USSR, in Cuba and elsewhere, the predators exterminated their preys, at
least those who did not manage to flee the country, so the predators ended up
starving. Social-democratic states were clever enough not to scare off all the
"caribous" and keep enough of them alive, so that the ruling class
could prosper. The environment however is changing before our eyes.
Social-democratic economies are not growing as steadily as they did, and joining
the predators? class is seen as the short and safe way to make a living.
Families want their daughters to land a job at a Ministry, farmers demand
subsidies, industrialists beg for tariff protections, the elderly want higher
pensions? Every dominant class throughout history faced this demand from
outsiders to participate in the loot. At first, the exploiters found ways to
restrict entry. For instance, participation in the class of feudal lords came by
birth only. But sooner or later, the dominant class had to give in to allies?
and dependants? pressure. Athens had to integrate its meteques, its resident
aliens ; too many colonials became Roman citizens (think of the Apostle Paul) ;
in France, under Louis XV, as state coffers were emptying, the King was simply
auctioning off access to the noble ranks? The present ruling class is even
more vulnerable. It finds it impossible to restrain the number of predators, as
new entries are conferred not by birth, but by an exam. This method of selecting
predators on the basis of expertise was what the Enlightenment considered its
highest achievement : "La carri?re ouverte aux talents.." Not the
scions of ancient families, but the ablest citizens, whatever their social
origin, would rule the country. Of course, these new rulers, as they became in
charge of public education, would make sure the curriculum would favour their
own kin. You seldom see an ambassador?s son working on a factory line, and
they are not many factory worker?s sons who make it to an ambassadorship. It
is a defining characteristic of a ruling class that it perpetuates itself
through generations. The problem for the present ruling class, however, as Marx
anticipated, is again technological innovation. As the economy evolves from the
Machine Age to the Information Age, it requires better qualified people, not
illiterate factory line workers. Information Age workers are people who have the
capacity to pass all the barriers for admission into the ruling class. So the
number of predators is swelling. It is the ruling class? "internal
contradiction." Democracy Of course, this is not the only problem
the exploiting class is facing. Its other worry is that the ideology which
comforts its legitimacy, the Enlightenment philosophy, also supports the
political regime known as democracy. Democracy?s perversity is that it turns
all of us into accomplices of the violence exerted against society. We accept
this violence inasmuch as we hope to become the oppressors ourselves. In a
feudal society, it is clear who the oppressors are, and who are the victims,
because you are born into one camp or into the other, as I was mentioning
earlier. You are born a slave or a serf, and all your life, you remain an
innocent victim of your oppressors. Democratic society blurs this line between
villains and victims. It gives everyone an easy chance to take part in
oppression. Every time we cast our vote, we are signifying that we wish to take
control over part of the population, that we want to impose upon these men and
women our ideas and values and we want to extort from them the financial means
to achieve our own goals. Democracy is the system that perverts every
individual?s soul and turns every man and woman into a racketeer. With the
conjunction of democratic racketeering and an inflating ruling class, the burden
on the exploited masses is getting unbearable. Exploitation is naked and
brutish. Even ideology soon will not be able to explain away why we are
ransomed. The Big Lie Yet the ruling class? ideology has done a good
job so far, when you think of it. It made us believe that without the state,
roads would not be built, the poor would agonise in the streets, hospitals would
not be funded, and no one would write theatre plays any more? On radio and
television channels, in the newspapers, at schools and in universities, at
churches, everywhere, we are told that democracy is the only viable regime ;
that "social justice" is the common good ; that it is morally
acceptable to coerce any individual if it is for the good of the collective ;
that the end justifies the means ; that there are experts up there in
government, who are taking care of our well-being, who know better than we do
what is good for us, if only we would let them? Conservative ideologues
maintain that class struggle does not exist any longer, we are all middle-class
now? Leftist ideologues still believe in this idea that we are exploited, but
exploitation, they say, comes from the rich, from multinationals, from Wall
Street financiers and Swiss bankers… No one ever mentions that the exploiters
are the state bureaucracy and its lackeys, the military-industrial complex,
subsidised farmers and industrialists?, living off funds extorted from the
productive masses. Such blindness is amazing. On my left, you have a class of
people with guns. They run the army, the police, justice, they control the media
through broadcasting licenses, they exert censorship. All the means at their
disposal come from taxation, your revenues and savings extorted literally at gun
point. On my right, you have multinationals and small entrepreneurs, productive
workers and creators… They bring you the food you consume, they build your
houses, they connect you to telephone networks and television channels, they
supply you with clothes, they manufacture your automobiles and your computers ;
they are so afraid that you would stop buying their goods, which you can do at
any time, that they spend zillions advertising them on glossy paper and video
clips. Now, who are the exploiters ? The people with guns, right, the people who
don?t offer you anything you wish to have, or they would have no need to
confiscate your money in order to produce it, the extortionists ? Wrong.
The exploiters are the capitalists. Isn?t a feat of genius on the
ideologues? part that they have us believe the exploiters are the producers,
the creators, the providers, of the goods you enjoy to buy ? The bigger a lie,
the more faithfully it is believed. In a Fran?ois Truffaut film, there is this
schoolboy who arrives late in class. He knows the teacher won?t believe any
story about trains running late, bus accidents, and the usual excuses. So he
makes a sad face and declares : "My mother just died". The whole
school assembles immediately and offers sympathy ; no one suspects this tragic
death could be a lie. Political lies have to be so gross as to be believed.