Economic liberalism, or liberal capitalism, is the child of two modern subversions, one against God and the other against kings. It, however, constitutes a third subversion that, this time, is waged against human communities. It is anti-ecological.
1. It is the practice, depicted later as a scientific theory, of a social life without divine positive law to direct, regulate and soften its brutal mechanisms, and without political authority to subject private interests to the major necessities of the common good and so maintain a certain indispensable equilibrium and stability, a superior justice. Thus material, and above all financial, social power develops all its effects without hindrance. The pursuit of the highest profit and yield, the domination of the market, the monopoly of goods, and thereby of power and honours, even to the buying of consciences, prevail over every other consideration.
Such is the materialist civilisation, or rather such is the triumph over Christian civilisation of the old Talmudic concept of existence, become the basis of Anglo-Saxon society, Calvinist and Puritan: wealth is a sign of blessing!
2. Such a theory of life in society would in itself be quite inhuman. To invite millions upon millions of men freed from all constraint and from all moral reserve, to organise and lead their lives as they like, guided only by their immediate material interests, constitutes the most senseless manifesto of social revolution. Such a frenzy for economic freedom implies a radical negation of all the natural factors of ecological equilibrium, for want of which man becomes his own worst enemy! All family, communitarian and corporative prudence will be banished from individual relationships, as will all political order and any fraternal mystical spirit of charity.
3. The practice of this liberalism is even more monstrous still. For it gives rise - above and beyond the billions of individuals freed from every law, or rather deprived of all protection by virtue of the System - to an even more powerful owning class. This class is authorised by the System to enrich itself still more, to dominate the economy, and to consolidate itself in dynasties, coalitions and multinational societies, it alone benefiting from the social cadres, from the ecological prudence and force that it keeps for itself and refuses to others, especially the poor, in order to guarantee its own prosperity! For such is the hidden malice of the liberal capitalist system.
But this prudence of caste that is maintained amid a theory and climate of general imprudence, this dynastic family ecology the strength of which lies in the general dissolution of society, finishes by being contaminated itself by the very anarchy it preaches. Plutocracy, having decomposed society according to the rule of its system, meets its own ruin in this very same system.
Just as a magnifying glass focused on the letter of a word enlarges it out of all proportion and makes it impossible to see what precedes and follows it, detracting from its logical meaning, so the liberal fixes his attention on mutual agreements, interpreting them as no more than a meeting of simple economic forces, without restraint, without subordination, without moral reserve, without human face, without family, without nation, without religion.
1. Such is « the market » in the eyes of a liberal - and in this matter the whole world has become liberal. The first consequence of this is that everything comes to be seen as merchandise. Everything can be bought and sold. The interest of human life is to buy and sell. Progress consists in producing more in order to sell and earn more, in buying in order to consume. The result of this is a prodigious acceleration and increase of exchanges, and a consequent increase in the production of goods, the mobilisation of savings, the commercialisation of everything including even cultural and religious goods, and a fantastic growth in consumption and waste, ending in a burning up and annihilation of the world's natural resources.
Through the magic of the « market economy », the whole man, or every man, is at last able to satisfy his every need and desire in universal abundance. Liberal progress is fundamentally philanthropic.
2. It is to attain this ideal, which exclusively flatters the interests and passions of the human individual, his greed, envy and pride, that liberal capitalism has broken every barrier restraining its expansion, has overturned every obstacle and quashed every attempt at reaction.
Rural communal life was the first to be sacrificed to the demands of industrial progress. In England this involved the violent suppression of rural family smallholdings along with its system of enclosures. In France it involved the revolutionary abolition of common goods. Everywhere in the world it involved an exodus from the country and an urban concentration that immensely widened the labour market to the detriment of family ecology and its domestic prudence. Man as well becomes merchandise.
Later, liberal capitalism prevented the formation of new social cadres, such as working men's unions and peoples' friendly societies, but even more it prevented any national or religious re-awakening in the measure that they threatened to hamper the full liberty of the market, the absolute condition for general progress.
3. The price to be paid for the abundance of industrial goods and unlimited growth in consumption is only beginning to be felt by the majority. It is the loss of all freedom, the mutilation of any other life but that of the market, the impossibility of breaking out of this passion for having which, more than any other, strips and debases being. It is the alienation of the subject from objects, about which one discovers in the end that it is not just an innocent theory, but a system for plutocratic domination.
As long as free exchanges and contracts were effected within natural living communities, they remained civilised, empirically moderated by ecological prudence, moral justice and Christian charity. The measure of value, laws of exchange, mechanisms of competition and conditions for maximising profits remained almost unknown, such a study being of no interest other than theoretical. On the other hand, since liberalism has isolated the market and deprived it of every external rule, its free play has become the object of a deceitful science called « economics ». Aristotle saw this as no more than a secondary science, « chrematistics », the science of the production and exchange of goods within the City. How right he was!
1. Modern « economic science » is therefore the systematic and practical knowledge of the mechanisms of the market, spontaneously instituted, set in motion, developed and automatically regulated by the free encounter and confrontation of individual interests in a society that is neither frozen or protected but open on principle to every initiative. Thus at any given moment we find the various operators of the life of the economy - capital and labour, production and consumption - reciprocally informed, evaluated and balanced. Liberal society is in a state of spontaneous self-management. Economic science applies itself to knowing the mechanisms of this self-management.
2. In reality, this science of the market's mechanisms is only of use to the owning classes, who alone have the effective freedom of entering or not into the play of the market and of directing a part of the market for their own convenience. The consumer needs to buy such and such a product immediately; the business man, the worker, the peasant need to gain a wage or some immediate profit for the work they have to offer; and the investor the interest of the capital on which he lives. All are constrained by need and tied to the particular character of their contribution. They arrive at the free market as job-seekers. The financier, on the other hand, with his « anonymous and vagabond fortune » (Philippe Duke of Orleans, 1899), is constrained by no necessity of time nor bound by any form of employment. He rules over the market and his knowledge of its mechanisms allows him to win every time.
Therefore economic science is at his exclusive service, until the State gets involved. This science informs him how to obtain the maximum profit from his liquid funds in an unprotected market. In this way the great banks end up directing the whole game and in accordance with their own interests they steer the concentration of capital, industrial production, business and even the consumption of goods! This science, which is supposedly directed towards the maximum general prosperity, in fact facilitates the fatal process whereby money dominates the entire economic life - « freed » from every other constraint - and subjects it to the laws of its own profit. It is a very peculiar form of philanthropy.
Human life on earth is regulated both divinely and naturally by secret harmonies, which prudence demands that we know and respect. Otherwise, God punishes the ungodly, nature takes its revenge on the imprudent, and society rebels against the false brother and excludes him. Liberalism was doomed to experience this boomerang effect. The idea of freedom, hurled by capitalism against every other power, will in its turn hit back. The vital force of traditional society used to be the family interest prudently managed. Liberalism has replaced this with the free individual pursuit of the maximum profit in a market without constraint, where money is the absolute deciding factor in everything. However, « what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul », and even his life?
1. The benefits of liberal capitalism are obvious. They are: the fantastic increase in the production of material goods and the constant perfecting of the means of production; the increase in volume and mobility of capital investment; the unprecedented progress of the mechanisms of the market, and finally the growing satisfaction of individual needs, amplified and diversified beyond reason. It is a fine performance.
The most remarkable performance, and that most forcefully asserted by the liberal economists, consists in « the automatic information and regulation of economic activity by the free market », making this creature of liberalism « a highly desirable institution » (Aftalion).
2. The misdeeds of economic liberalism are nevertheless very grave. They consist essentially in the systematic destruction of other regulating factors of social life or in their degrading assimilation to its law of profit, and in the internal corruption of its own model of society - its inevitable « decomposition » (Schumpeter).
The system is wrongly criticised for the severe « crises » it encounters in its ever accelerating progress. These crises, however, only come from a transitory lack of balance - so called « endogenous factors » - between production and consumption, supply and demand, means and ends. Hitherto the system had always surmounted them despite the crushing mediocrity of its leaders and appointed thinkers.
Capitalism's unpardonable imprudence lies elsewhere. It lies in its blind obstinacy in destroying every force other than that of money and in crushing, exploiting and devouring every weakness that it believes it controls. The great crises that will block the system and bring about the collapse of the capitalist world will come from external causes, from « exogenous shocks », which will be unforeseen because unprovided for: the revenge of slaves against Money.
Economic liberalism places money and man, Having and Need, in a direct relationship without any need for mediation. It thus creates a collaboration, not of communitarian exchange, as it would seem, but of servitude, coupling the natural flow of the production of goods for consumption to the profit flow of money lent and repaid with usury. The whole of liberal economic science is the organisation of this parasitical addition of the capitalist flow to the economic flow, all for the purpose of its own maximum profit.
1. It was foreseeable that those exploited by the system, the proletariat of the 19th century, the third world of the 20th and 21th centuries, should become aware of this perfect trickery in order to pay back in kind. It is the fight for wages and welfare benefits; it is the takeover of the oil and raw materials production apparatus in order to attempt to control their prices and monopolise resources; it is the increase in the price of petrol and raw materials... There comes a time when everyone is equally good at the game, equally devoid of scruples, and also just as exclusively focused on making a profit as is the capitalist class.
2. The outcome may be dramatic. Capitalist cynicism flaunts itself shamelessly: money rules and dominates everything. It will provoke the vengeance of those who are duped by it, and it will incite the revolt of its slaves. It will be enough for them to denounce the hypocrisy of the system and overturn it to shouts of Freedom or in the name of Islam's superiority, through an uprising of the human masses or by force of arms. General strikes, revolutions, insurrections in the suburbs, terrorism, dictatorships, nationalisation of foreign goods.
3. Faced with these « exogenous shocks », neo-capitalism imagines that it can translate them into « collective costs », and that a price can be paid to bring them under control. In vain. To struggle against ideas and armed revolution requires a « supplement of soul », a spirit of military heroism, a civic sense, a solidarity - all forces and virtues that have been killed by liberalism. These non-market values, so-called « externalities »… because they are external to the market, neo-capitalism dreams of « internalising » them and promoting their rebirth with money. It will pay for more children to be born, for military honour, for prayers in Church, for the construction of Mosques, for submission to the law, for social generosity!
Capitalism ends by finding itself caught between an enemy that is not for sale and its need for vital and spiritual resources that cannot be bought on any market. It must then resort to politicians and soldiers; it must come to terms with them or else founder in fire and blood.
The Revolution of 1789 was raised against God and against the king in order to institute Liberty, but even more for the abolition of privileges, with the promise of Equality for all. Economic liberalism made much of guaranteeing this equality of opportunity and of wealth through the full freedom of the market. Alas, it soon became obvious that this purely theoretical declaration of the « rights of economic man » was a snare. The real strengths of the partners were far too unequal for their profits not to be even more unequal. The profits were absolutely disproportionate to their vital needs, as also to the importance or merit of their respective contributions, the effort made, the risks incurred, the competence and the courage displayed. It appeared that the free play of supply and demand inexorably profited the rich, who grew richer still, even if it did not pauperise the poor to the same extent, as has been claimed.
1. Socialism is primarily a claim to equality in the distribution of goods acquired through human labour. With the proclamation of political democracy, which consists in the equality of social rights, economic democracy, which consists in the equality of access to material goods, must normally follow and be maintained through the play of economic freedom. Noting the growing inequality between the capitalist and working classes, socialism denounces this injustice as the hidden vice of the liberal system. This is what gives it its passionate character, its justice-loving tone, its breath of generosity. It pleads on behalf of the poor, who are abused, robbed and exploited by the rich.
2. Socialism, in its origin, is of Methodist inspiration. The Anglican Church, « the Established Church », had for too long preached that wealth, according to the Bible, was the certain sign of divine blessing. It was thus compromised with the owning classes, covering up the exploitation of the poor with the cloak of religion. As a reaction against this, Methodism preached another biblical lesson - although of an equally judaic, terrestrial and carnal spirit - announcing salvation to the poor and calling on them to throw off the oppressions of a bad world, pointing them towards a kingdom to come where virtue alone will guarantee the prosperity of all in universal justice and equality.
3. Socialism defines itself as a popular uprising of the masses, a romantic uprising, the strength of which resides in the prophetism of its leaders and the utopia of a better world. It is easy for its adversaries to denounce its « fundamental irrationality ». The primary socialist intuition of the hidden disorder, of the trick of the liberal system, is absolutely lucid. Then, it is true, it becomes confused in its search for the causes of the injustice it denounces; it loses its way dreaming of solutions that are just as materialist and liberal, but which are supposed to be innocent, egalitarian and fraternal.
1. In its principles, socialism leads to a form of anti-economy because, in order at last to establish equality, it advocates the suppression of private property, which it regards as the primary cause of all the evils of capitalist society. It also attacks all private power involving the management of enterprises, the direction of investments and future planning. For a modern socialist a real economic democracy presupposes the collective appropriation of both the major and minor means of production, capital and land. It also presupposes the management of business by the workers - at all levels, right to the very top - and the management of the national economy by the whole people.
2. Moreover, equality of goods demands a just sharing out of wealth and a continual redistribution of revenues. This new socialist demand should logically lead it to condemn the market and to envisage its radical suppression. As a corollary of this, it should demand the suppression of money and ultimately the extirpation of the very idea of profit from the heart of man. Then men would no longer have the ties of the market between them; they would no longer be led by selfish interest, but by the sense of collective interest; the « convivial society » (Ivan Illitch), which is the socialist ideal, would appear.
3. Now, the market is the essential structure, money is the fluid element and individual interest is the primary motivator of economic life. If these three elements were suppressed, one would wonder what would be left of the natural and traditional human relationships. If socialism rightly stigmatises capitalism's radical injustice, capitalism regains its advantage by challenging the socialists to feed the people as well or better than it does. It asks them by what means they can do this.
4. Since Socialism is unable to integrate the market, it is condemned to shine especially in electoral and parliamentary opposition, which is fruitful and without risk. If for a time it takes power, it tries to appear in a good light by distributing and squandering what conservative governments before it had saved. Distant from its political and economic responsibilities and lurking in the Civil Service and trade unions, it feeds on dreams and builds utopian model societies, where men no longer have passions to master or bodies to feed. As for economic structures, production mechanisms and exchange controls, nothing!
5. When Socialism is urged to act, it will call on the State, it necessarily generates state control. It takes on the form of political totalitarianism. It is the logic outcome of an integral democracy, where the people administer their own justice, govern themselves and see to their own administration in every domain through the State they have set up. The State, the emanation of the people, governing on behalf of the people, is the nation's infallible protector and manager. The error and the crime of the bourgeoisie were to take from the State all economic power, so that it thereafter fell into the hands of the unjust. Socialism restores all power to the State. It is perfectly logical and follows from a democratic blind faith.
6. The justice-dispensing State accedes to the peoples' demands. It suppresses private property and all private power of economic control. The proprietor State becomes the administrator of public wealth and, as the only social power, it manages all economic activity. The sense of the general interest, which the democratic State possesses by definition, gives it competence and prudence. It is therefore the perfect replacement for the whole delicate mechanism of the free market and its subtle regulation by the capitalist class. No more financial speculation, no more pursuit of the maximum profit, no more free play of supply and demand, no more anarchic competition! State control is perfect. A bureaucracy of functionaries gathers and classifies information and determines the real needs of the collectivity. A state technocracy fixes the objectives and modes of production by means of a series of plans, which ensure the exact satisfaction of people's needs, without shortage, without excess and without waste.
1. In all liberal societies, the work of governments that are openly socialist or impregnated with the socialist theses - reacting against the capitalist ethic of maximum profit, enterprise, risk, competition and brazen inequality -, spreads a feeling of suspicion and of envy, paralysing the rich and making them feel guilty, whilst inciting the claims and pride of the poor. Big capitalism is in no way affected or touched by this; it simply conceals its profits and its power. Small and medium properties and businesses are directly affected; they are discouraged from taking any initiative, arrested in their development, and tightly controlled and pressurised by the tax authorities. The masses of bureaucrats and salaried employees, on the other hand, see their rights increase and augment their claims. In the final analysis, socialism never manages to establish equality: the rich become still richer, the poorest continue to be made even poorer by collectivisation and inflation.
The failure of Swedish socialism is instructive, after its alleged success had created such enthusiasm. Soft socialism is the place of despair.
2. A gigantic and tentacular bureaucracy, recruited from among the socialist electorate, duplicates within the administration of the State the hierarchised organisation of capitalist technocracy. And lo, now we have two administrative monsters, rather than just one, to devour the nation's substance together.
The remaining virtues still encouraged by capitalism, hard work, savings, invention and personal involvement, are corrupted, and nothing is left of the previous man or of modern economic man but a grasping and contentious consumer.
3. The Marxist revolution, which alone goes the whole way, has the advantage of dispelling outright the socialist illusion; the disadvantage is that it gives the peoples a taste of the price to be paid for the experience of liberty and equality for all: it tastes of famine and death. The State-Party, the State-Boss, the universal State-Profiteer guarantee for themselves the monopoly of wealth and of freedom, granting the peoples the order and peace of total slavery, but it is unable to ensure economic development and prosperity.
The faults of the system are too well known: the rigidity and sclerosis of its structures, a lack of adaptation to supply and demand, excesses here and shortages there, the black market, misappropriation of funds at every stage, and irresponsibility. Then in order to combat the temptations of misery and despair, there arise ideological pressures, xenophobia, and skilful terror tactics that despatch the reactionary elements to the concentration camps or death. Socialism is hell.
1. It is not the bourgeoisie as a social class, nor even as a socio-professional group of industrialists and businessmen, who prove to be incapable of political authority and stability. It is the bourgeoisie as revolutionary - as a moral union of assassins of God and the King, of the noble and the artisan, of the knight and the villein - that is incapable. It is capitalism as liberal - that is to say, as principal agent behind the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of privileges, regicide, the civil constitution of the clergy and the Vendéen genocide - that is incapable. For the French Revolution provides a valuable example.
Money, become the religion and the politics of a certain organised social power, wished everywhere to be master and no longer servant. Thereafter, it waged a life and death struggle, a permanent revolution against all natural and all traditional authority, against every sacred custom and order. For that purpose it needs lackeys and torturers; it goes from one to the other, attaching them to itself by ever higher salaries and by exorbitant concessions, before collapsing beneath their blows.
Such is the true history of contemporary France. It is an indefinite manoeuvring of capitalo-industrial power simply to hold on to its financial privileges. France - and the world, for that matter - has been and still is governed by permanent deicides and regicides, who call themselves liberals and who claim to be conservatives, but whose only concern is to carry out business and to prevent the people from rebelling.
2. When the social insurrection is unchained, capitalism allies itself with the socialist party, the role of which was and still is - at the price of financial support and enormous advantages - to channel the popular revolution in such a way that it does not harm the new lords, the financiers and industrialists, and to turn it against the ancient bodies that remain the bête noire of the liberal bourgeoisie. Organised socialism, in the pay of established power, and a hidden branch of bourgeois freemasonry, is first and foremost anticlerical, antimilitarist and republican. That is its threefold function. It regularly diverts the people's anger and national insurrections away from their true object, the wall of money, the two hundred families, Judaic plutocracy and Masonic democracy, to pitch them into helping the very people who are exploiting them and attacking the social forces that are their natural, legitimate and sacred defenders: the Church, the Army, and the Monarchy.
Such is « the shady entente » between the powers who run the world and the ideologues and managers of the socialist parties. The result of which is this chaotic series of oppressions and sterile revolutions, which make for the world's decadence.
1. Historians present the 19th century, as the century of liberal capitalism, invading the zone of the civilisation of our ancient Christian monarchies and extending to the colonised world. Painting things blacker than they are, historians emphasise the price that had to be paid for this domination of the « great bourgeois dynasties » and, in the world, of the great industrial and mercantile nations: inhuman oppression and exploitation, plunder and exhaustion of natural resources. There are very few historians, however, who note the deterioration of social relationships, the corruption of political life, the suicidal Malthusian propaganda, and the degradation of religion, become « the opium of the people » (Marx), through Money.
The 20th century was to be the century of communism. After the capitalist exploitation there would naturally have followed the people's emancipation; after the polluting and corrupting anarchy of western liberalism would have naturally followed the austere rigour of a powerful collective order. Bloody revolutions, wars of conquest, genocide and the re-establishment of slavery by whole nations would have been no more than stages towards a new humanism hitherto unknown.
Thus the passage from capitalism to communism appears to them as normal as the revolutionary substitution of Protestantism for Catholicism and of liberalism for the monarchical order!
2. The Phalangist protests. It is an extremely serious error to believe that Capitalism and Communism are in unyielding opposition.
The world's resources and mankind's needs present capitalism with an immense and limitless field for exploitation and commerce. The human mind's capacity for invention does not follow but rather precedes the demands of industry and of consumption. Capitalo-industrial organisation is capable of being extended to the ends of the world; computer systems exceed our ability to utilise them. This industrialised society seems to have the necessary means of self-protection. The globalisation that began in the last decade of the 20th century demonstrates it.
Economically speaking, the future of capitalism appears infinite. Relying on its power, capitalism was able to make a sure ally of communism in its war as ever against God, against kings and against man. It is the dark side of the 20th-century history: whereas communism seemingly fought against the entire capitalist world considered as a bloc, the leaders of the capitalist world relied on the communist aggressor in order to prolong their own domination over peoples for whom they are not, and never have been, the true masters.
To that end, capitalist leaders handed them over, piece by piece, to communism as to a necessary ally, not as to an enemy. Thus, the Christian West would consider capitalist powers as the defenders of the free world, while, along with communism, they had undertaken a common revolution against God, against kings and against man.
3. Only the courageous denunciation of this agreement between international finance and Soviet imperialism would have been able to provoke the only salutary awakening, the religious and political reaction of peoples and of historical nations against their tyrants of yesterday and of tomorrow, against their common atheism, their materialism. It would have been the political and social complement to the obedience of Popes to the message of Fatima. Instead of this, everywhere, the world-wide victory of capitalism under the name of globalisation was facilitated by the intellectual and progressivist party's rallying to Communism's seemingly unavoidable victory. It would only fight against its excesses and not against its very principle!
Globalisation is the last manifestation of liberal capitalism. Heralded for a long while as the ideal of international finance's domination over the world, globalisation became a reality at the end of the 1970s through the agency of the Trilateral Commission. Its idea was simple: « financiers choose technocrats who fabricate democrats out of nothing, in order to rule the world by means of these interposing puppets. » (Abbé de Nantes, CCR n° 92). Its programme was to go beyond the confrontation phase between communism and capitalism in order to establish a global agreement that would facilitate technological, commercial and financial exchanges, on the pretext of fighting economic disparities and of settling the major global problems of energy supply, the ecological risks, etc.
This policy was a salutary solution for both the communist countries, which were weighed down by state collectivism and the arms race but also for the capitalist countries, the saturated economy of which needed new markets.
A profound upheaval as regards governance was experienced in the last decade of the 20th century. This upheaval was presented as unavoidable progress for the prosperity of the planet. What remained of national autonomy was wiped out by the constitution of regional political groups, e.g., the European Union or of purely economic groups, such as free trade zones. Under this regime, the economic structure of historically prosperous countries was deeply altered by the phenomenon of relocation, while in the Third World or in former communist bloc countries, emerging economies developped prodigiously. There followed a formidable increase in financial exchanges. They became a fully-fledged economic activity that were more productive of wealth than the real economy!
The Davos Conference continues the work of the Trilateral. Representatives of our Western governments, the masters of the international finance, as well as representatives of Communist countries attended it. Although globalisation is meant to bring peace and well-being to the whole world, it is in fact nothing more than the application of capitalist imprudence to the whole world.
Therefore, even before drawing up the exhaustive list of the advantages and disadvantages of globalisation, there exists an extremely simple principle for judging and discerning with extraordinary clarity the truth in the apparent confusion of events. Any power, whether it be a monarchy, an empire, a dictatorship, a republic, socialism or communism, that declares itself faithful to the great Principles of 1789, is or will be the tool of judaeo-masonry and shares in its threefold fight against God, against kings and against man himself, restoring the sole dictatorship of Money.
If, on the other hand, there is a future for the world far removed from the triple alliance of capitalism, socialism and communism - which originally are three forms of biblicism, Judeo-Protestant, Calvinist, Methodist and Lutheran, and which end in three forms of barbarity, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Slav - this future will be Catholic, royalist, and communitarian, in the manner of those happy times before 1789.
« All have sinned », that is all the social classes, who have been left to their instincts by the proclamation of unbridled freedom and the abolition of all moral and legitimate political order, resulting in a return to the law of the strongest. All are complicit in the « System » or bound to it. Everyone shares in it, partly through necessity, partly through cowardice, selfishness or hatred.
1. The industrialists, prompted by capitalist interest and pursuit of the greatest profit, unleashed this conflict. Competition, the first law of the market, obliged them to keep down cost prices, thus, salaries and working conditions, which are easier to squeeze than the other costs of production. Thus was born the proletariat, plunged into a state of dereliction worse than that of ancient slavery, worse than that of beasts of burden and machines. The shame was that of the aggressive employers, of the system, rather than that of the men themselves.
2. The workers entered the conflict very belatedly, after they had succeeded in grouping themselves in defence of their daily bread and that of their children. Their revolts, their strikes, their coalitions were all just! They, however, lacked any recognised social authority. Their unions failed to moderate their claims and thus launched the working masses against religion, the country, the army, bourgeois society, and even against their own livelihoods! The shame is that of revolutionary unionism, rather than that of the workers.
3. The politicians took advantage of the misery of class warfare to establish their own position and fortune. They gave scandalous facilities to the « great bourgeois dynasties », so that they might appropriate the nation's principal sources of wealth, reducing the State to an employee of plutocracy. Then, deceiving the working people, they politicised the labour movement, making the trade union organisations mere stepping stones to the conquest of power, to all the fine positions in political life, to be shared discreetly with the agents of high finance. Shame on the parasitical politicians, and, even more, shame on democracy!
4. The big banks - in ever closer symbiosis with the republican and social-democratic State, the greatest usurer of the country - holding money, lending it to whom they like, how and when they like and on the conditions of their choosing, have been and still are the only winners in this social war. When the banks are nationalised, the technocratic financiers take over from the private financiers, playing the same game in their own interests and for their own political views. State nationalisation aggravates the evil of capitalism, and the loser is always the country. It is the country that must be freed from these controls, and in the first place from control by the banks, by restoring the country's own institutions.
5. Here, one must add the men of the Church whose “social doctrine” has supported the principle of this capitalist economy in order to make it evolve towards socialo-capitalism, even to the point of finally approving globalisation. In so doing, they have blessed the domination of Money over the world, instead of defending and preaching the principles of Catholic ecology that govern the temporal framework of the reign of Christ and of the Blessed Virgin here below.
6. Nevertheless, even if capitalism, which is an impiety and an imprudent system, seems to triumph everywhere, it is inevitably doomed to ruin. When the Blessed Virgin at Fatima announced the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, She also affirmed that “a certain time of peace” would be given to the world. This promise implies the assurance of a merciful restoration of the society, according to the principles of ecology, which are the only ones capable of ensuring its peace and prosperity.
Even though the inadequacies and blemishes of socialism are evident for all to see and its takeover by capitalism is proved, socialism nevertheless sought and found - more or less, but this is a vast issue! - the remedy to the capitalist evil, at least in its French theoreticians such as Proudhon. This Proudhonian French socialism - « socialism with a human face » and « mutualist » - has clearly nothing to do with marxism, « the tapeworm of socialism » (Proudhon). On the contrary, it tends to the rediscovery and reconstruction of the most natural and the most traditional ecology.
1. Self-administration claimed to bring about a revival of the « convivial society » by rescuing the working people's destiny from a heartless capitalism. The return of property ownership and the power of decision at the grass roots, to the enterprising community where everything is on a « human scale », falls in with our corporatist project. In both cases it is a question of restoring to an organised people their freedom to dispose of themselves, their work and their property.
Unfortunately, democratic egalitarianism dilutes the right to private property and the power of decision by collectivising them, thus making self-administration impossible, as the Yugoslav experiment has proved! On the other hand, the organic and hierarchical corporation - for example - is viable and sure.
2. Nationalisation claimed to restore order, justice and peace through the intervention of an independent authority, that of the State, as judge, arbitrator, controller and regulator of an economy that the free rein left to confronting factions had reduced to a savage jungle. This recourse to a sovereign authority, animated solely by concern for the common good, falls in with our appeal to a sovereign but absolute Power that is independent of parties and of the powers of money. It is therefore not subjected to electoral constraints. This absolute Power alone is capable of freeing the working people from subjection to the great by withdrawing from the financiers the exorbitant rights they have granted themselves, so as to entrust the interests of trades and all professions to those who are truly involved in them.
Unfortunately, the democratic error corrupted the remedy and made it worse than the evil itself. For the democratic State is neither disinterested nor impartial, but partisan and monopolising. While the intervention of an absolute sovereign Authority is a deliverance from parties and from factions, democratic nationalisation is a subjection to state collectivism.
3. Socialism, with its democratic religion, condemned the people to misery and slavery. Its demophilia, however, approximates somewhat to our position. The Phalange, profoundly enamoured of the people's happiness and social justice, would willingly call himself socialist, were it not for democratism.