by K R Bolton
Academy of Social and Political Research
Multicultural politics, including that concerned with immigration, is a method of social engineering. Whoever raises a voice in public in opposition or even merely of caution is pilloried as a “racist” and a “reactionary”. Conversely, those who champion multiculturalism are upheld as the paragons of ‘progress’ and humanitarianism. Yet behind the moral façade multiculturalism is a cynical stratagem, an important part of the process of globalisation in the interests of a small, self-appointed plutocratic elite. This essay examines how multiculturalism is an aspect of globalisation.
“See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist—it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn’t built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super-exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist - just because it’s anti-human. And race is, in fact, a human characteristic - there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced - that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.”
-Noam Chomsky
It is ironic that an intellectual championed in particular by the anarchist-Left has given such a cogent definition of the motivating force behind multiculturalism. Among the numerous references to Chomsky made by the Left his diagnosis of capitalism as being “anti-racist” because it aims to create a society of humans as nothing more than “interchangeable cogs”, does not receive the same attention as his other views. As Chomsky states, individuals cannot function at an optimum level as producers and consumers if there are racial or what we might further categorise as cultural and national, divisions.
Chomsky is outside the mainstream of Leftist ideology, which sees humanity and the individual in precisely the same terms as capitalism sees humanity as defined by Chomsky in the above passage. Both capitalism and Marxism are globalist, and both are reductionist in seeing economic factors as the primary determinants of human behaviour and history. Marx himself was not adverse to Free Trade capitalism. He supported Free Trade insofar as he saw it as a dialectical catalyst for the destruction of national boundaries, which would internationalise “the proletariat” and eventually lead to a global system. Global capitalists maintain the same outlook today. Marx’s analysis in regard to Free Trade was correct, although his alternative is nothing more than to change the ownership of production and distribution. Marx said of Free Trade:
“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the modern of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish faster.”
Today’s global corporate executives and planners concur with Marx. Marx further identified “protectionism” as the conservative position, Free Trade as subversive and revolutionary. Those – mainly political scientists and journalists, especially in the English-speaking world – who insist on defining “conservatism” (sic) as Free Trade liberalism, should return to an actual source; in this instance Marx, to re-evaluate their definitions:
“Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities, and renders the contrasts between workers and middle class more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense to I vote for Free Trade.”
South Africa Succumbed to Plutocracy – Not Communism
A classic example of the way by which multiculturalism is sold behind the moral guise of ‘anti-racism’, ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ in the interests of plutocratic exploitation is that of South Africa. Without arguing the merits or otherwise of apartheid, the salient factor in considering multiculturalism as part of the globalisation process is that the fall of the Nationalist Government was the outcome of a nexus between Black communist-inspired terrorists from below and plutocracy headed up by the Oppenheimer interests working from above. Here communism and Big Business served as pincer movements with the ‘Boer’ in between. In eulogising Harry F Oppenheimer on his death in 2000 Mandela stated:
“His contribution to building partnership between big business and the new democratic government in that first period of democratic rule can never be appreciated too much.”
The result has not been a regime that would deliver South African wealth to the Blacks in a new utopia of peace and plenty. Rather the African National Congress (ANC)/Communist Party regime has opened South Africa up to globalisation and destroyed the remnants of the economic nationalism of the Afrikaner nationalist governments. It was the Afrikaner nationalists who stood for State economic intervention and who stood up to monopoly capitalism, since the days of the old Boer Republics. The Black regime has reversed this economic nationalism in favour of globalisation and privatisation.
In 1996, according to a Reuters report, Nelson Mandela, heralded as a saint by the capitalist press and the Left alike, stated that: “Privatisation is the fundamental policy of the ANC and will remain so.” Now the ANC Government is busy dismantling the state economic structure erected by the Afrikaner nationalists to safeguard their nation from the incursions of international finance capitalism. The ANC/CP Government is turning State run utilities over to global corporations, just as ‘privatisation’ and globalisation in New Zealand was originally enacted under a so-called “Labour” Government. For e.g. the State has divested itself of its 40% share in South African Airways, once the most profitable airline in Africa. The Johannesburg municipal water supply has been privatised and is now under the French corporation Suez Lyonnaise Eaux. Eskom the state electricity producer, was made into a public corporation to pave the way for privatisation. The ANC stated that: “Eskom is one of a host of government owned “parastatals” created during the apartheid era which the democratically elected government has set out to privatise in a bid to raise money.”
This good comrade, Mandela, nurtured by the Communist apparatus in South Africa, lauded by the Western media as a saint, paved the way for the privatisation and globalisation of the South African economy. He has followed the example of the rest of de-colonised Africa, where the global corporations moved in once the colonial administrations had pulled out. Global Capitalism and Cultural Identity
It is with the view to destroying national, cultural and ethnic boundaries that global capitalism promotes open immigration.
In their study of global corporations based on interviews with the corporate elite, Barnet and Muller state that both Adam Smith, theorist of Free Trade, and Marx, predicted that capitalism would become international, which has been pointed out in the opening passages of this essay. Barnet and Muller write that, “The world managers are the most active promoters of this Marxist prediction” of globalisation , of which we have previously quoted from The Communist Manifesto.
Barnet and Muller state that Jacques Maisonrouge, president of the IBM World Trade Corporation “likes to point out that; Down with borders, a revolutionary student slogan of the 1968 Paris university uprising – in which some of his children were involved – is also a welcome slogan at IBM.” Maisonrouge states that the “World Managers” (as Barnett and Muller call the corporate executives) believe they are making the world ‘smaller and more homogeneous”; that the “global corporation is “the great leveller’”, or as Chomsky puts it, everyone is being levelled down as an “interchangeable cog” in a world economy. Maisonrouge approvingly describes the global corporate executive as “the detribalised, international career men.” It is this “detribalisation” that is the basis of a “world consumer culture” required to more efficiently create a world economy.
These “detribalised, international career men” were more recently described by G Pascal Zachary, financial journalist, as being an “informal global aristocracy”, recruited over the world by the corporations, depending totally on their companies and “little upon the larger public”, a new class unhindered by national, cultural or ethnic bonds. They are without nationality, and are quite literally ‘interchangeable cogs’.
