08) ARE WE PART OF THE DARK SIDE?

 

By Johan Boyden, Central Organizer, Communist Party of Canada

 

Are we part of the Dark Side?

 

            I recently found myself asking that bizarre question while listening to the radio. And no, it wasn’t in the context of the new Star wars movie.

 

            Last month in People’s Voice I wrote about the new Prime Minister’s “sunny ways” in contrast with his predecessor. On a whim while researching that article, I googled “Harper + Darth Vader” and was surprised to get hundreds of hits, including under image search. But I wasn’t listening to that either.

 

            I was listening to a interview, hosted by CBC’s Michael Enright, with William Watson.

 

            Maybe you’ve never heard of William Watson. I hadn’t. But he is an esteemed McGill University professor and author of The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty (University of Toronto, 2015).

 

            Enright seemed to greatly enjoy doing the interview. I couldn’t see, but I have no doubt he was wearing a special ultramarine conservative blue bowtie for the occasion.

 

            Together the two Old Boys were having a jolly good time, disseminating more neo-liberal clap trap about how the poor are to blame for their own misery.

 

            At one point Watson offered up this gem of wisdom: “I think it is very fashionable not to defend capitalism and not to appreciate its virtues. Which is kind of funny, because [my] book starts with a discussion of the 'End of History' with the fall of the Berlin Wall and capitalism had won, it had vanquished everything, [...] and in the 25 years since, well, the Dark Forces have made a comeback against capitalism.”

 

            Well, we may be from the Dark Forces. But apparently we’ve made a comeback. We are even “fashionable.” Tell me more, Professor, this is getting interesting.

 

            Watson isn’t, of course, very interested in that story. It would involve talking about how capitalism has acquired even more blood and dirt on its hands in the last ten years, the detritus of smashed civilizations, bomb-blasted cities, life-crushing poverty, ecological disasters, famine and cyclical crisis. 

 

            Build a monument to the Victims of Capitalism since this “end of history,” where every brick is a fatality, and you might as well build a stairway to the Moon.

 

            The juggernaught of exploitation, oppression and misery will always, as Marx so aptly put, create its gravedigger. The Dark Forces, at Watson so inaptly put it, will return.

 

            To be sure, the professor is not in the least outraged about social inequality – in fact, the opposite. Social inequality, he admits, is one of the burning questions of our time. But, he says, it is also misconception and a trap. 

 

            A misconception because inequality is greatly over-rated as a social problem. And a trap, because instead of focusing on the poor, we blame the rich. Most importantly, “obsession with it may cause poor and non-poor alike to doubt capitalism,” he says in his book.   

 

            “[I]t can hardly be healthy if millions of people believe the economic and social system they live under is fundamentally unfair,” he writes, adding: “The strength and bitterness of the criticism of capitalism emerging not just from the Occupy Movement but across the political spectrum suggests many people may well begin to look for alternative ways of organizing society, especially if, as some economists forecast, slower economic growth becomes the twenty-first-century norm.”

 

            For example, Watson has a beef with the current Pope who likes to talk about the poor. Maybe Watson agrees with the Fox news commentators who announced a few months ago that “all the Pope needs is a dog with a bandana and he could be on Occupy Wall Street.”

 

            Look closer at what Watson is saying, however, and you will see a problem that has the entire capitalist class very looking serious: slower economic growth is here to stay.

 

            No doubt Barack Obama was being somewhat rhetorical when he told a meeting of US banking CEOs at the start of the economic crisis that his administration was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

 

            But on the sidelines of last year’s Davos conference, an economic advisor quietly let slip that a number of his billionaire clientele from the “one percent” are buying up “boltholes with private airstrips” – mansions tucked away in places like New Zealand’s Southern Alps, in case of mass civil unrest.

 

            The professor, despite his class loyalties, probably does not have funds for a secret villa on Lake Hawea, accessible by helicopter. His main effort is to argue-away the problem of inequality. Economic fairness and unfairness, he says, are just part of the natural social order – like good or bad cholesterol!

 

            But in so doing, Watson unabashedly confesses, he largely justifies “the position of the winners.”

 

            So – who really is part of the Dark Side? And yes, the pitchforks will reach your office window, professor.

 

(The above article is from the February 1-14, 2016, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)