The monsters have returned because the masters of the New Science have not been able to manage the economy, the free-fall of inequality and humiliation. It is not that the workers and the unemployed workers are now stronger. They are weaker and more disorganized. But they are also angry. And anger can lead in many directions. It can tear society apart, drawing the bile of the torn social structure into family life and into inter-personal relations. It can create anti-social feelings that erupt in violence of all kinds, disassociations from community, hatred of class enemies. The atmosphere of rebellion can always exist without any real possibility of rebellion. Trade unions have been gutted, rural workers have been disinherited from their small plots of land, debt stalks ordinary people from one end of the world to the other, and Left parties are on the back foot. But anger remains. It festers. It could turn into aggression. It could threaten the lives of the rich—their homes on fire, their businesses smashed.
Johann Rupert, the boss of Cartier, told the Financial Times Business of Luxury Summit in Monaco in 2015, “How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and social warfare? We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.” Nick Hanauer, who made billions of dollars when he sold aQuantive to Microsoft in 2007, wrote to his “fellow Zillionaires” a few years ago. His warning is stark: “No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchfork didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.” These are not radicals. These are the people who exist in the realm of the .01 percent of the wealthy. They can see that economic ruin and social humiliation might produce the strongman, but his appearance does not settle the deep sense of resentment and anger amongst the people produced by social conditions generated by a policy that benefits the rich.
Who will keep the workers and the unemployed workers in line and capitalism humming? The monsters. That is why they have returned. Not to attack the workers’ movement, because it is weak and is not an immediate threat, but to remove the gloves and crack down on collapsed society. Security states grow, the police are in charge, and militia groups emerge to intimidate society into silence. Lynchings of Dalits and Muslims in India are linked to the murder of supposed drug dealers in the Philippines, who are further linked to the shooting of black men and women by police officers in the United States. The monsters take their cue from normal, boring bourgeois democracy. The institutions of bourgeois democracy are also saturated with the apparatus of repression. You don’t need the monsters for police brutality to become normal or for wars to distract you from your own problems. But the monsters offer something more. They are not just bourgeois democrats who hide behind the police and the military. They are out on the streets, telling the hemorrhaging middle-class and the unemployed workers that it is neither the rich nor the state apparatus that are to blame for social failure. Nor is the way ahead for the despondent white-collar and blue-collar worker the path of the entrepreneur. The way ahead is to disparage the marginal, the vulnerable. It is those people who are at fault.
The monsters return not to tell the capitalists to pay more tax, but certainly to tell them to invest more. The monsters grab the economy by the throat and force it to cough out jobs. Yes, they are able to discipline the workers and the unemployed workers. But they cannot force the rich to produce jobs. That will not happen. Millions of people are no longer going to find employment. They have been made into zombies—the living dead. They exist so that they will soon not exist; they are born, but purpose has been taken from their lives. But what to do with their anger?
It is to be displaced, to be reoriented. Why should the workers and the unemployed workers worry about the rich? After all, say the monsters, the rich have earned their wealth. It is by ingenuity and hard work that the rich have climbed to the summit and built a gated community around their house. They have dug a moat around their community and erected guard towers with drones in flight between them. Anger at the rich will only get you killed, say the monsters. Don’t target the rich, they say. Turn your guns against the socially marginal.
The old monsters had a clever idea. They turned the workers and the unemployed workers as well as the middle-class against the Reds—who helped the workers remain strong—but also against the homosexuals and the Jews. It was easy to target the homosexuals, for there had been centuries of animosity bred inside religious traditions for anything that did not conform to the most conservative definition of human relations. It was even easier to target the Jews. Modern capitalism is bewildering, modern finance capitalism even more so. In the old days, the angry peasants would attack the home of the landlord or the overseers or the moneylender. They would run across the fields, pitchforks raised and torches lit. They knew who oppressed them. Matters were reasonably easy in the early days of industrial capitalism, when the factory was the target of the workers’ anger.
But with finance the game is difficult. Who is there to attack, which field to cross, which house to set on fire? Finance capital dominates through the structure, anonymously, a stealth form of oppression. The workers and the unemployed workers know that they are oppressed and exploited and made disposable. They know all this. But what they don’t easily know is who is responsible for their situation. They cannot burn down the bank, because the bank is not one building—there are too many branches, too many ATMs. They cannot burn down the corporate office, because they know that there are many of these as well, in many countries. The old monsters pointed their fingers at the Jews—there is your financier they said, using the deeply rooted language of anti-Semitism. The pogroms against the Jews morphed into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
The new monsters borrow the old monster’s idea. Workers and unemployed workers, the disposable part of humanity, also look at capitalism and wonder at who is firing them, who has ruined their lives. Once in a while, a disgruntled worker takes a gun to his former workplace and shoots his former boss. This happens. But not as often as you’d imagine. The guns are mostly turned against strangers, the rage phantasmagorical. The new monsters point their fingers elsewhere, away from the rich and the powerful and towards the vulnerable and the weak. It is the migrant that gets the brunt of the blame, for it is said—against all the facts—that it is the migrant who is taking away jobs from the workers and the unemployed workers. The migrants come from places of great desperation, where they have seen their own fields torn apart by capitalist farming and their jobs as landless workers vanished by mechanization. They have travelled across the deserts and waters at great peril, risking life and limb to get to places where they think they will find better work. There are few options for them in the new lands, where they find themselves doing the butt-end jobs and being treated with contempt by the armies raised by the new monsters. It is the migrant who must suffer for the plight of the workers and the unemployed workers. The migrants are the sacrifice for capitalism’s failure.
If it is not the migrant who is to blame, then it is some other social figure—the drug dealer or the terrorist. Citizenship is denied to them, the protections of basic human rights are withdrawn. Martial law arrives. Emergency powers are enacted. The strongman must be allowed latitude to protect the real citizens from those who have violated the framework of citizenship. There is no gap between the terrorist or the drug dealer and the migrant—even as the liberal might plead that the migrant is a victim of circumstance and not of choice. These liberal distinctions vanish at the heel of the state’s boot.