Let me state at the outset: being sceptical of the behaviour and motives of elites is a part of legitimate class consciousness. Conspiracy theories thrive because people are disturbed at the level of psyche by the exorbitant wealth-gap between ordinary people and multi-billionaires. It is this social environment and milieu which perhaps allows an over-abundance of conspiracy theories to flourish. Perhaps many are reactionary to the social exclusion and acute level of inequality under the now late capitalist mode of production. However, acute inequalities have been normalised in societies ever since the birth of empire. Ever since then people may have over-inflated the influence and power of secret societies and occultist symbolism of some elite clubs and organisations.
It is precisely the inability of human beings to agree on mandates and courses of action which may work against grand conspiracy theories involving large networks of elites, making this a difficult feat, perhaps at times improbable and even somewhat absurd. Transnational capitalist elites and native politicians do not have homogenous views on the full array of policy and ideological persuasions to cooperate in a seamless way and be effective of dehumanisation of the rest of the populace. We know that the world’s ‘1%’ attend Bilderberg group meetings attempting to consolidate power and set the agenda for geopolitical control in their own interests.
What is indisputable knowledge is a geopolitical trajectory approaching a conspiracy: in the late capitalist era there is a consensus among many elites for hyper-market liberalisation and the spread of the neoliberal approach to governance. across the globe. This suits the agenda(s) of multi-national corporations, where ineffectual and rather thin attempts at national anti-monopoly and competition regulation means that duopolies and cartels foster global market dominance, overpowering global, national and local worker, consumer and community organisations. They also desperately want, as their prime agenda, to construct a one world government based on this neoliberal form governance, with very low social mobility for the lower classes. They have already succeeded in establishing global government bodies and architecture which promote their narrow geopolitical and economic interests in terms of The World Bank and The International Monetary Fund. Their self-termed ‘New World Order’ is designed to usurp the sovereignty of nations to a centralized world government bureaucracy to uphold neoliberal policy.
There is the belief that ‘money talks’, and that a person with large and copious amounts of money can simply bribe others to commit crimes and corrupt acts on their behalf with total immunity and impunity. However, even elites may not be above the law, and criminal investigations may be adept at following the money trail. Also, elites do not need to bribe lackeys to carry out acts of crime and terrorism to leverage their wealth and gain great returns in their investment portfolios. There is a lack of a direct monetary incentive to do so. In canvasing the opposing view, mega-elites may be able to solicit services in secret, such as paying a neuro-scientist exorbitant amounts of money to live in a basement to augment elite’s brain; perhaps we are not at that technological level, but there is a real risk, as nano-tech and bio-tech become more sophisticated, of a bio-morphological fracturing within the species along class lines, as elites will be able to afford the very expensive transhumanist brain augmentation, and cognitively outcompete non ‘cyborg’ humans.
Extremists do not need the financial backing by capitalist elites, as they often procure weapons and explosives themselves and are ideologically driven, usually as a result of a lack of education or psycho-pathologies. In contrast elites are more interested in maximising profits from their corporate governance and investments.
What we should acknowledge, however, is that what elites want the most is power, not money. Money is merely a means to that end. This kind of power which elites covert we may term – ‘geopolitical power’. Non-elites have a different kind of power, which we may term – ‘compassionate power‘. Sklair’s term and formulation of the Transnational Capitalist Class (‘TCC‘) as the current ruling class of the globe – is a technical term for what many class conscious people have dubbed and understand as ‘the 1%’. It is the most robust and successful form of global empire the world has ever seen. With concentration of wealth in the 1% TCC – the most unequal it has ever been in history, is it any wonder that we have perhaps an over-abundance of conspiracy theories?
For those interested in social justice, in theorising conspiracies we should not be wholly diverted from challenging social structures and thus achieving structural change at the level of economic and social systems and institutions. Too much emphasis on conspiracy theories without a reconciled ideology and praxis (on class, race and gender for instance) to guide our grass roots movements and social justice scholarship, will not be effective and not yield the changes we need for a truly humanist project on earth. Expending precious time and resources on what might be, at times, tenuous links between criminal activity, draconian laws and elite clandestine activity. We must organise effectively for structural change at the level of economic and social systems and institutions.
Yes, elites meet in private, such as at The Bilderberg Group, but they may not be in agreement of a dehumanisation programme for the rest of us. I am sure they would like for people to accept a RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) implants to both centralize and collect data (financial, biomedical, and social credit ratings) as a part of a high-tech surveillance state. Their aspirations may be somewhat disparate and themselves ‘all too human’, which may work in the majority’s favour. They are also interested in a level of global security, since they too are threatened by international violence, war and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
We should re-evaluate simplistic fear-based thinking. We should replace it with complex understandings and focus on tangible struggles in our locales, nations and the globe to fight the root cause of social corruption – and that is extreme economic inequalities.
Henry Willoughby's Social Justice Blog 