Introduction, proofread

Added a few missing emph, reordered paragraphs, plus one or two slight changes.

Introduction

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+T\chapter{Introduction}
+
+\section{THE TOTALITARIAN LIBERALISM}
+
+\chapterauthor{Maurice CURY}
+
+The world dominated by capitalism is the free world, capitalism, which is now called only liberalism, is the modern world.
+It is the only model of society, if not ideal, at least satisfactory. There is and will never be another.
+
+This is the unanimous song sung not only by economic leaders and most politicians,
+but also intellectuals and journalists with access to the mainstream media: television, press, large publishers, usually in the hands of industrial or financial groups.
+Dissident thought is not forbidden (liberalism obliges!) but channeled into a quasi-clandestine way.
+So much for the freedom of expression that the proponents of our liberal system gargle about.
+
+The virtue of capitalism is in its economic efficiency. But for whose benefit and at what cost?
+In Western countries, which are the showcase of capitalism while the rest of the world is rather its back room, let us look at the facts.
+
+After its great period of expansion in the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and the ferocious exploitation of workers, the movement that has accelerated over the last few decades has led to the virtual disappearance of the small peasantry devoured by large farms, with the consequence of pollution, the destruction of landscapes and the degradation of the quality of products (and this taxpayer's money since agriculture has not ceased to be subsidized), the virtual disappearance of small local shops, particularly food outlets, in favour of large retailers and hypermarkets, the concentration of industries into large national and then transnational firms which take on such proportions that they sometimes have larger treasuries than those of states and make the law (or claim to do so), taking steps to strengthen their power
+without control, such as with the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) over states. (United Fruit is the boss of several Latin American states.)
+
+The capitalist leaders could fear that the disappearance of the small peasantry,
+of the crafts and the industrial and commercial petty bourgeoisie would strengthen the ranks of the proletariat.
+But \enquote{modernism} has provided them with the parade with automation, miniaturization, computing.
+After the depopulation of the fields, we are witnessing the depopulation of factories and offices.
+As capitalism does neither know or wants to share profit and work (we see this with the indecent and hysterical reactions of the bosses on the 35 hours, a measure that is nevertheless very meek) we inevitably arrive at unemployment and its cohort of social disasters.
+
+The more unemployed there are, the less compensation is paid and for a shorter time. The fewer workers there are, the more reductions of pensions are planned.
+This seems logical and inevitable. Yes, if solidarity is distributed over wages.
+But if we take into account the gross national product which has increased by more than 40\% in less than twenty years while the wage bill has continued to decrease, it is quite different!
+But this is not in the capitalist logic!
+
+Nearly twenty million unemployed in Europe, this is the positive result of capitalism!
+
+And the worst is yet to come. Major European and American firms whose profits have never been so prosperous announce
+% these are double quotes in the original text, not guillemets
+layoffs by the hundreds of thousands. It is necessary to “rationalize” production, competition obliges!
+
+The increase in foreign investment in France is applauded.
+In addition to the dangers to national independence, it is questionable whether it is not the fall in wages that encourages investors.
+
+The French champions of liberalism — of \enquote{modernism}! — (see Alain Madelin!) only swear by England and the United States 
+who would be the champions of economic success and the fight against unemployment.
+If the destruction of social protections, the precariousness of employment, 
+low wages and the short-term non-compensation of the unemployed which makes them disappear from the statistics are Mr Madelin's ideal,
+I do not think it is the ideal of the workers of this country.
+
+In the USA, a paradise of capitalism, 30 million inhabitants (more than 10\% of the population) live below the poverty line, and among these blacks are in the majority.
+
+The supremacy of the United States in the world, the imperialist and standardizing spread of its way of life and culture can only satisfy servile spirits.
+Europe would do well to be careful and react, as it still has the economic means to do so. But it would also need the political will.
+
+To assist productive investment in industry or services, capitalism has the will to make them competitive in the face of short-term financial and speculative investments.
+How so? By taxing the latter? Not at all, by\rfootnote{in the original, there is \emph{on} which means \emph{we}, but it doesn't match with the rest of the sentence, so i suspect there is a typo and it's actually \emph{en} which lmeans \emph{by}}lowering salaries and social charges!
+
+It is also a way of making the West competitive with the Third World. In Great Britain, they started to make children work again.
+Neither the United States's vassal, nor his overlord, has ratified the charter prohibiting child labor.
+
+Caught in the infernal circle of competition, the Third World will have to lower costs and push its inhabitants a little further into misery, then it will be the turn of the West again…
+
+Until the whole world is in the hands of a few transnationals, mostly American, and that we hardly need any more workers, except an elite of technicians…
+The problem then will be for capitalism to find consumers beyond this elite and its shareholders… and to maintain delinquency born of poverty.
+
+The accumulation of money—which is only an abstraction—prevents the production of capital goods and elementary goods useful to all.
+
+The black book of capitalism is already written before us in its \enquote{paradise}. What about his hell, the Third World?\footnote{\label{foot0} In the dictionary of the twentieth century (Fayard), Jacques Attali puts forward the figure of one in four people living in the US below the poverty line. Worldwide, nearly 3 billion people have less than \$2 per day, 13 million die of hunger every year and two-thirds of humans do not benefit from any social protection.}
+
+The ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism in a century and a half are incalculable, nor can the millions of deaths attributable to it be quantified.
+All the major European countries and the United States are guilty. 
+Slavery, ruthless repression, torture, appropriation, theft of land and natural resources by major Western, American or transnational companies or by local potentates in their pay, creation or artificial carving up of countries, imposition of dictatorships, monoculture replacing traditional food crops, destruction of ancestral ways of life and cultures, deforestation and desertification, ecological disasters, famine, exile of populations to megacities where unemployment and misery await them.
+
+The structures that the international community has set up to regulate the development of industries or trade are entirely in the hands and at the service of capitalism:
+the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization.
+These bodies have only served to indebt the countries of the Third World and to impose on them the liberal creed.
+If they have allowed the development of insolent local fortunes, they have only increased the misery of the populations\footnote{Read Philippe Panure, Le Village monde et son château (World village and its castle), le Temps des Cerises, 1995.}.
+
+In a few decades, international capitalism will hardly need labor anymore, automation obliges!
+American laboratories study \emph{in vitro} cultures, which will definitively ruin the agricultural Third World (and perhaps French agriculture, the world's second largest exporter).
+Instead of sharing the goods, it will be unemployment that workers around the world will definitively share\footnote{Read Jeremy Rifjin, La fin du travail (The End of Work), La Découverte, 1996.}.
+Yet essential services concerning education, health, environment, culture, mutual assistance will not be provided or will no longer be provided because they do not generate profits and are of no interest to the private sector, because they can only be provided by the States or the community of citizens to whom liberalism wants to remove all power and all means.
+
+What are the means of expansion and accumulation of capitalism?
+War (or protection, like the mafia), repression, dispossession, exploitation, usury, corruption, propaganda.
+
+The war against indocile countries that do not respect Western interests.
+What was once the prerogative of England and France, Africa and Asia (the last upheavals of colonialism in India, Madagascar,  Indochina, Algeria caused millions of deaths), is today that of the USA, a nation that claims to rule the world.
+To this end, the United States has not ceased to practice a policy of over-armament (which it forbids to others).
+We have seen this imperialism exercised in all direct or indirect interventions of the United States in Latin America and particularly in Central America. (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada), Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor (genocide proportionally greater than that of khmer rouge in Cambodia — nearly two-thirds of the population — genocide perpetrated in indifference — if not with complicity — of the West), Gulf War, etc.\footnote{Read Noam Chomsky, \emph{Les Dessous de la politique de l'Oncle Sam} (Uncle Sam's policy's backstage), Écosociété, EPO, le Temps des Cerises, 1996.}.
+
+War is not only fought by arms but can take new forms:for example, the United States did not hesitate to help the Moon sect in Korea to fight against communism, the fascists in post-war Italy, they have not hesitated to arm or subsidize Islamic fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban in Afghanistan. 
+War can also take the form of embargoes against indocile states (Cuba, Libya, Iraq), oh so deadly for the populations (several hundred thousand, even millions of dead in Iraq).
+
+Spoliation is the obvious reason of the use of force. If you want to rob a house where the inhabitants are, it is better to have a weapon.
+
+The practices of capitalism are close to those of the mafia, which is probably why the latter proliferates so well in its the former's soil.
+
+Like the mafia, capitalism protects docile rulers who shamelessly let their country be exploited by large American and transnational corporations.
+It thus consolidates — when it does not set them up — dictatorships, which are more effective in protecting corporate assets than democracies.
+
+Its weapons are indifferently democracy or dictatorship, trading or gangsterism, intimidation or murder.
+Thus, the CIA is arguably the largest criminal organization in the world.
+
+Usury, another mafia process: like the mafia lends to the merchant who can never pay his debt and ends up losing his shop (or life),
+countries are encouraged to invest, often artificially, and weapons are sold to them to help fight indocile states,
+and they must repay eternally the accumulated interest on the debt, this way you become master of their economy.
+
+Repression and exploitation go hand in hand: anti-union repression (which was once legal), now unacknowledged but still practised in companies,
+repressive surveillance, criminal employers' militias\footnote{Read Marcel Caille, \emph{Les Truands du patronat} (Bosses's thugs), Éditions sociales, 1977.}, unions initiated by the bosses (CFT) and repression against any radical workers' protest\footnote{Read Maurice Rajsfus, La police hors la loi (The Outlaw Police). Le Cherche-midi, 1996.}.
+This is the price to pay to make exploitation possible. And we know, since Marx, that the exploitation of labor is the engine of capitalism.
+Western economies benefit from slavery in the Third World and from the serfdom of illegal immigrants in Western countries.
+
+Corruption: Multinationals have such financial or political influence or pressure on all public or private officials that they stifle all resistance in their octopus tentacles.
+
+Propaganda: to impose its creed and justify weapon stockpiling, its criminal acts and its bloody crimes, capitalism always invokes generous ideals:
+defense of democracy, freedom, struggle against the \enquote{communist} dictatorship, defense of the values of the West,
+while it most often defends only the interests of a propertied class, that it wants to seize raw materials,
+govern oil production or control strategic locations.
+This propaganda is propagated by economic and political rulers, a servile press and media.
+These are the \emph{watchdogs} already denounced by Nizan, the \emph{Betrayal of the clerics} vilified by Julien Benda\footnote{Read Serge Halimi, \emph{Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde}, Liber — Raison d'agir, 1997.}.
+
+Supporters of liberalism, lauders of the United States, I have not heard your voice speak out against the destruction of Vietnam, the Indonesian genocid,
+the atrocities perpetrated in the name of liberalism in Latin America, against American aid to Pinochet's coup d'état, which was one of the bloodiest in history\footnote{Read Chili, \emph{Le Dossier noir}, (Chile,  the black file) Gallimard, 1974.},
+the killing of Turkish trade unionists; your indignation was somewhat selective, Solidarność but not the Disk, Budapest but not Algeria, Prague but not Santiago, Afghanistan but not Timor,
+I did not see you indignant when communists or simply those who wanted to give power to the people or defend the poor were killed.
+For your complicity or silence, I do not hear you asking for forgiveness.
+
+\rauthor{Maurice Cury}
+
+Maurice Cury is a poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter and television, radio and theatrical author. Latest publications: \emph{Les orgues de Flandres} (The Organs of Flanders) (novel),
+ \emph{La Jungle et le désert} (The Jungle and the Desert) (poems and texts) E. C. Éditions, \emph{Le Libéralisme totalitaire}.
+
+President of the Permanent Council of Writers, Vice-President of the National Union of Authors and Composers.