Marxism International

It’s not surprising of course when a high French official publicly calls the rioting crowds of largely Muslim youth “scum”.   That and worse I imagine is routinely uttered by officials in like situations everywhere.   It is rather unsettling to read that at least one leader in the Islamic community agrees with him.   But then the fortnight of unrest precipitated by the untimely deaths of two youths on the run from the police has little, really, to do with the devout of any faith.   It really comes down to jobs, or, rather, that steady and vexing lack of them that has increasingly plagued the capitalist West during the past two decades.   Increasing immigration was designed to both drive down wages for all workers  AND provide a model of worker “flexibility” which would facilitate the movement of capital across increasingly fissiporous borders.   It is no longer a tenable policy.   In fact, the capitalist model of development, hailed only a decade ago as the apogee of human civilization, is, increasingly, in disarray.  

In China, by contrast, it is a matter of urgent policy at all official levels to facilitate the creation of at least fifteen million tenable jobs over the coming year.    Similar programs, in fact, are taking root throughout Asia’s growing economies.    India and Vietnam have over the past two years inaugarated programs that assign job-creation supreme status in national policy.   Both, like China, have radically increased spending on ancillory social programs, a practice all but junked in the modern capitalist economy.   

The youth of the European muslim diaspora, orphaned by the fabulously wealthy and the fabulously corrupt of all nationalities, are finding neither jobs nor subsidies in their new home.    Theirs is, increasingly, the despairing rejoinder of “surplus populations” throughout the capitalist world.

But the growing insurrection goes far beyond that.   There is a revolt sweeping  the older capitalist states and the “newer democracies” alike that takes many forms but which can best be described as a growing and general resistance to received models of “globalization”.   It is much in evidence everywhere, from this summer’s resounding “No” votes on the EU Constitution to the growing political crises in the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Germany and, indeed throughout the capitalist world.   It is even beginning to appear on the streets of America in the wake of Katrina and the burgeoning scandals among the ruling elite.   Ordinary people of every faith and nationality are more and more loathe to accept precipitously declining standards of living in the name of some pie-in-the-sky ideology preached by those who famously care only about fattening themselves or those who pay them at the expense of the public good.  

As for the devout; will a disintegrating capitalism, finally, teach them the salient wisdoms of human existence?  Life is first of all the struggle over the division of goods and services.   The need for productive work is essential to the health of the human psyche.   We are, all of us, transient citizens of an amoral universe, possessing neither a soul nor innate ideas, but a common origin and a common fate.

And there is no God of any kind.  

Anywhere.