In 1787, to impress his ex-mistress, Catherine II, then on a trip to the Crimea, Minister Potemkin ordered the construction of false villages in order to make her believe that her people were happy and hide the real misery of the country.
Since the 1980s, neoliberalism with the help of the media has built a global Potemkin village, where we are taken for walks whenever we have doubts. So far, it has worked perfectly, and the happiness provided by finance and (false) competition seemed to be more or less established, and those who challenged it were considered, at best, to be in bad faith, at worst, as supporting terrorism.
It was, alas, without counting on nature, that damn nature which neoliberalism still cannot get rid of, despite its repeated "greenwashing" operations. Now nature, which knows nothing in politics, cares little for newspeak and economic-political nuances.
China, the fascist regime and worthy heir to Mussolini, was the first victim, despite its ultra-totalitarian policy of super-control. Unable to face the truth, it now pays for it with a death toll probably ten times higher than the figures announced.
But then, the covid-19, who decidedly does not respect anything, came to us, after having visited the totalitarian Iranian theocracy. And there, the masks (for those who had them) began to fall: all our hospital infrastructure, dismantled since the 80s to make room for the private sector and its financial interests, are failing us. Our hyper-technological algorithmic society is useless. Factories close, shops close, restaurants close, museums close, everything closes except hospitals and supermarkets.
Our governments turn out to be helpless at best,criminal at worst (heavy glance directed at all those who preached "group immunity", that great Nazi idea). The finance experts, who we saw every day parading sternly in TV shows are now MIA - trembling with fear in their villa in their week-end villas.
Those who save the country are the underpaid employees in supermarkets, the nurses and health personnel in the hospitals, the teachers who are doing their best to teach from home, and all the usually invisible world of logistics or social infrastructures. All those to whom the system sometimes said "they should work more to earn more", or that they are "nothing". If there weren't so many dead, we could joke that we find ourselves in a classic XVIIth century fable. But one can, without joking, wonder what will be the moral of this story. What did the neoliberal system do after the 2009 financial crisis? Nothing. What will it do after the covid-19 crisis? Probably nothing.
The problem is that if Potemkin had built the villages for the Tsarina, the neoliberal system built them for itself and it does not even realize that they are false. Or rather, if they are "real" for them, then they must be "real" for everyone else.
Covid-19, a dirty little revolutionary virus in spite of itself, has just shown everyone that solidarity is better than competition, that strong social structures allow crises to be better managed than with a confetti of privatized companies, than strategic institutions and productions must remain national, because if not, well, everything falls to the ground like a bad cinema set.
When the crisis is over, we will then have to fight with all our might so that this Potemkin village can never ever be re-built again, and claim that reality is on our side and not theirs.
Amen to this. The real experts now have a double duty - not only to speak to the utmost of their expertise, but also to speak truth to the power that has swaggered naked but now desperately gropes for a fig leaf.
ReplyDeleteThank you. And, unfortunately, WE are the figleaf...
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