An Open Secret that Must not be Known

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And the growth of all this wealth leads to a psychopathic hysteria on the part of the propertied classes, fearful lest any of the growing bounty should fall into the hands of the rest. In fact, as C.L.R. James observes, this wealth in San Domingo (Haiti) had already begun to slip away from the Big Whites and into the hands of the rich mulattos, whose relatively Puritan life-style led to a faster accumulation of wealth than among the wasteful 18th century ruling class of San Domingo who squandered their profits on expensive luxuries imported from France, on holidays in Paris and so on.

An hysterical reaction to over-abundant wealth and the promise of even vaster uncontrollable wealth in the future –thanks to scientific-technological development –characterizes precisely the problem that is afflicting the propertied classes today. They concoct stories about growing scarcity –the degradation and exhaustion of the Earth’s resources –to justify their outrageous behavior in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and their venal threats against Iran, Syria and other “strategic States”.

Their hysteria has nothing to do, then, with the possible exhaustion of petroleum (despite their “scientific” theories referring to its “organic” origin), and we ask readers to examine the truth of what we are saying about this on these pages and on other sites that refer to this question.

Abundance is at the core of all cosmological truth, though in our times it is a truth that is discovered and rediscovered by class society, by a society in which a minority possesses Power over economic resources. Abundance is discovered by Capital, under Capital, in a world dominated by Capital, i.e. in a world where slavery continues in disguised forms under authoritarian rule whose mask of democracy has slipped as increasing productivity has revealed greater and greater wealth.

The propertied classes’ state of anxiety in the face of this mounting abundance causes them to use everything to prevent the Earth’s resources from empowering humanity, by driving and channeling new wealth out of our reaches, by destroying it completely if necessary, and by retarding the development of science and technology which it knows will reveal still greater abundance in the future, thus creating real scarcity where abundance begins to appear dangerously. This is the origin of the growing authoritarianism of the State and the escalating scramble for war.

But it is an open secret, because perceptions of abundance have opened our eyes everywhere –not simply in political economy, but in the natural sciences as well, which have been distorted throughout history by the voice of property, to justify and prolong its privilege by promoting artificial limitations and emptiness everywhere, to cover its parasitic ways.

And while we believe that abundance cannot be contained for ever, we know that only by changing ourselves can humanity change the world.