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Flashmag February 2021 www.flashmag.net
The right of economic interference against the abuses of the richest towards the poorest do not yet exist, and perhaps it should be created or rather it is being created, informally because human beings in the face of adversity always find alternatives to survive. While cowards believe that the best risk is to hunker down and obey, and possibly take advantage of the system including by oppressing their fellows, some on the other hand understand that the only favorable outcome is to fight in their own way the system of spoliation.
Reddit's WallStreetBets (WSB) forum, which has been making financial headlines for the past few weeks for its crusade against Wall Street speculators, is the epitome of the popular backlash to the oppression of the economic elite. The group of more than 5 million Internet users who are amateurs of finance, accuses the stock market elites of being carrion, who bet on the financial difficulties of certain listed companies, to earn money by playing on the decline in their market value. By deciding to jam the "short sale" a system authorized on the financial markets, the army of stock marketers decided to fight to defend (and perhaps save) some companies by influencing their quotation directly on the stock market.
Beyond the financial saga, which the lasting probity remains difficult to imagine, as the manipulators of the stock market themselves can be manipulated by more obscure forces, like the French revolutionaries in their time, it is rather the meaning of this action which deserves special attention.
What's interesting about this stroke of brilliance, against the economic establishment is that it comes at a time when the virtual commerce industry, is supplanting the real commerce industry. A kind of war between the world of selfish speculation, which ignores the daily experiences of the women and men who depend on their jobs in these companies for a living, and the selfish interests of a few members of the establishment, who have for sole conscience, the doctrine of profit at all cost. Obviously, when some only look at their turnover, they obviously do not see the social score of their harmful bulimia; and they even come to believe that the perverse effect is only a fad of the weak, even a reality necessary for their expansion.
The similarities with the period of the French Revolution, and the times we are living are not trivial. By way of comparison, in the years preceding the Revolution, there was a tense social climate as well as a growing distrust of the people towards the absolute monarchy of divine right. The notable famine episodes. Combined with very harsh winters, poor harvests and a sharp rise in the price of bread between 1787 and 1789 (+ 75%), led to riots in the French countryside. The extreme misery of the people was matched only by the extreme wealth of the aristocracy. All this, in an era of wide dissemination of the ideas of Enlightenment Philosophy, what was to happen, happened, although later the lapses and hijacking of the revolution would instead give birth to something more repressive, in this case the warmongering empire of Napoleon Bonaparte.
In this 21st century the Western world for too long has been ruled by a caste of politicians and oligarchs who, like the bourgeoisie and nobility of the French 18th century, arrogates to themselves almost everything. The COVID-19 pandemic, for its part, mirrors the period of frost, natural drought, and famine, which did not, however, prevent royalty from taking even more repressive acts against the lives of populations. If despite everything one can state that the measures taken to counter the pandemic were taken to protect the people, few cannot say that the repressive measures and the socio-economic effects of the pandemic were not used by Western governments to silence dissent as in Emmanuel Macron's France with the yellow jackets movement, or to bring down political enemies as in the United States where the pandemic was the fatal weapon which allowed the overthrow of the Trump administration in an electoral contest that will have kept many observers in suspense.
On the social and economic level, the coronavirus crisis has been a boon for the technological oligarchy, which has seen its profits multiply with staggering enrichment records amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars for oligarchs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk from Tesla or Bill Gates from Microsoft, the latter, that the health crisis will have no less enriched because he is at the center of the search for the curative and vaccine solution of this pandemic. Solutions that cost the taxpayer billions of dollars, further enriching the oligarchs who control the pharmaceutical industry.
The current crisis is strikingly conspicuous in that it has allowed the real decline of the middle class, destroying the small business owner, forming the intermediary industry that it has ended up tramping.
The abysmal impoverishment of the population has created two preponderant classes. That of the super-rich strong by its money, and that of the poor strong by its number. Interspersed between the two, the petty bourgeoisie, which before constituted the middle class, is so in debt, and fears to fall into the
Lerone Pieters