itude amounts to a separation of the individual from the collective. This stranded individual becomes nothing more than a helpless slave to the system.
He explains: “From time immemorial, the slave has been the one reduced to being nothing but an individual, someone separated from their community or from their people, someone who is no longer driven by their own thought (in other words, the thought of the collectivity to which they belong) but by that of their master”.
At times, Lapierre seems to shake his head in astonishment at how this ever came about, at how a mentality so alien to every healthy human culture could have come to dominate the species. He writes: “Let’s not forget that in a traditional society the merchant is the stranger, the one who doesn’t respect the rules of the social game, and here we have this being who has set himself apart from society, who doesn’t take part in the interplay of mutual obligations and who only acts in his own interests, and is now poised to conquer the planet”.
He makes it admirably clear that this mercantile domination is not something that has evolved peacefully or somehow emerged naturally through any kind of consensus. The capitalist world-view has always been imposed by force. He cites the example of Australia where “the Aborigines had to submit to the idea of exchange held by the British colonists, or else disappear: massacres, deportations, reserves or concentration camps; the indigenous people and their way of seeing the world do not interest the British colonists, they are wiped out or fenced in”.
Again and again, says Lapierre, “absolute violence” has been used to impose the rule of money: “Violence is at the heart of capitalism… To submit to the capitalist system-world, consciously or not, is always to do violence to yourself”. As well as violence, there is deceit. Part of the totalitarian domination of mercantile thinking involves the hiding of the mercantile nature of our society, the induced forgetting of the notion that there could ever be another way of living. Our master’s voice tells us – from within our own colonised minds – that all this is quite normal, commendable, necessary, that it is simply “real life” to which we have to adapt and succumb.
This lack of consciousness is one of the veils that prevent us from understanding our society – the others include any inadequate critiques of our contemporary society which do not embrace this fundamental problem of a mercantile mindset. One of these is Marxism, says Lapierre. He points out that Marx’s analysis of capitalism came very much from within the capitalist system itself and thus remains trapped inside the mercantile cosmovision: “In fact, Marx never challenged the form of exchange with which he and his contemporaries were already familiar. He grasped its workings, and criticised them, but he didn’t criticise its spirit, or barely so”.
Lapierre concludes that the class theory of society simply does not explain the depths into which our contemporary civilization has sunk. He insists that authentic opposition to capitalism can never arise from within a broadly capitalist mindset and can never merely amount to attempts to reform capitalism, to make it nicer and more liberal or to place it under the control of a different group of people.
“It’s not about winning power and taking over the state, but about fighting power, opposing any project coming from above or elsewhere. It’s on the terrain of resistance to a capitalist project – mines, dams, wind turbines, monoculture, factories making consumer goods, high-voltage power lines, motorways, high-speed rail lines, etc – that you can judge the reality and validity of a struggle, its authenticity. All other forms of action – fights against poverty, for decent wages, for jobs, for access to goods, for shelter, for culture, for fuel, for education, for citizenship, for democracy etc – hand victory to the mercantile world.”
Although Lapierre’s book both inspired and informed me, I have to say that I do have some significant differences with more theoretical aspects of