IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL

It is therefore madness without equal To try to involve ourselves in correcting the world. Molière, The Misanthrope, Act 1, Scene 1

Right across this planet, there are three basic kinds of government under which people live. In the first, a particular group (often called a party) holds all the power, elections are rigged, the media are muzzled, and opponents are behind bars or vanish without trace. It is a situation that applies in many former or present 'communist' countries and in others that have emerged from colonial rule and continue their past rulers' brutality in various guises. In the second category, the regime is unstable and threatened with stones or guns – as in today's Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo. The third type comprises what are usually called 'democracies': elections take place at fixed dates, parliaments adopt laws, and governments manage public affairs. The richest countries periodically send their leaders to discuss the future of the world at secure places cordoned off by large numbers of police. The rest receive heaps of praise when they show that they have assimilated 'democratic' values while accepting the plunder of their resources and the reduction of their people to beggars.

The boundaries between these categories are not always sharply drawn: some major countries – Algeria, Iran, Russia – have features of both the first and the third, while others can pass suddenly from one to another, as Mubarak's Egypt did recently from the first to the second. And the countries of the 'Bolivarian revolution' – Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia – form something like a group of their own, in which some are willing to place their hopes.

Over time a zone of obligatory deference has formed around the word 'democracy'. Born at the heart of the West, it is a system of government that helps the rest of the world to join in by various means. All leaders, from the most emollient social democrats to the worst despots, feel compelled to affirm their attachment to democracy. It is incontestable because it is the regime of liberty, which an insidious shift then identifies with liberal values, free trade, free competition and neoliberalism. Since the end of the 'people's democracies', now a baneful memory, democracy has been inseparable from capitalism in its various aliases, and we shall therefore speak in this text of democratic capitalism.

Democratic capitalism has imposed itself as the ultimate, definitive form of social existence, not only in the ideology of the ruling class but even in the popular imagination. But its legitimacy rests on a tripod, each of whose legs is worm-eaten or seriously cracked. The first is the constant rise in living standards supposedly leading to the formation of a universal middle class – a process that first took shape with Fordism (wage increases in line with productivity, so that the workers can buy more and keep the wheels of industry turning) and the different variants of social democracy since the New Deal, the Popular Front and postwar British labourism. Today, that pillar exists only in the head: that is, in the forecasts of finance ministries and international agencies, which are constantly belied by the facts and keep being revised downwards despite all the massaging of figures.

The second pillar is the peace that capitalism is supposed to have brought to the planet after 'the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century'. One need scarcely be an expert in geopolitics, however, to see wars all around us: civil wars of an intensity that varies according to time and place (muted in Europe, fierce in the Middle East); terrible African wars against a backdrop of minerals, diamonds and famine; forgotten guerrilla wars in Burma and the Philippines; never-ending wars in Afghanistan, Somalia and Palestine. Are all those wars tribal, ethnic and religious? Behind each one, democratic capitalism is busy defending its economic and strategic interests, its oil, mining and agribusiness. Democratic capitalism has lost all credibility as the great pacifier, as the global Leviathan.

The most rotten of the three pillars is 'democratic legitimacy' based on universal suffrage. After all, nations are led by the men and women the people have elected, and if they are unhappy they have only to choose others the next time round. François Arago, an old Republican, already put forward this argument when he was shelling the barricades in the Latin Quarter in June 1848: universal suffrage has spoken, the people should not take up arms against those it has chosen.

But despite the etymology, despite the articles of constitutions asserting the sovereignty of the people, power nowhere belongs to the demos. That has been evident for a long time, but now there is something new as well. Today, power does not belong either to the caste of politicians who, by tradition, allocate ministerial and administrative posts to themselves in accordance with an electoral timetable. That kind of politics is no longer more than an empty form. Since 'the crisis', the masked reality lying unsaid beneath the surface has appeared in the light of day: the economy is directly political; power, to use the coy formula, is nothing other than 'the power of the markets', whose fears, whims and demands are expressed in banner headlines and commented on by all manner of experts (the expert being the emblematic figure of our times). Markets: that sounds reassuring. What is more peaceful than going to the market? The word maintains anonymity with regard to what it covers up, disguising all the aspects through which we participate in our own dispossession. We often read in the newspapers that 'the markets are worried', or even 'alarmed'. The public reaction would probably be less placid, less resigned, if things were spelled out clearly: those who are unhappy or alarmed are the directors of major banks and insurance companies, the managers of funds – not only pension funds but also speculative 'hedge funds', private equity funds – and the totally unregulated 'shadow banking system'.

There may be clashes of interest among the components of private finance, but these still form a single totality ('the markets') since all their top personnel have certain opinions in common. Trained in the same school of thought, reading the same texts, meeting in the same forums, they share the same vision of what is good for the world, and especially for themselves.

Moreover, there is a complete osmosis between private finance and national governments, central banks and the European Commission. This involves a dual mechanism of highly official lobbying and revolving doors. In France, the big career move for finance ministry inspectors is to join the top echelons of private banks, with a tenfold or twentyfold salary increase. This explains, for example, the shameful retreat of the Socialist government from Hollande's electoral promise of banking reform – a policy that was supposed to separate 'investment business' from deposit account functions, so that money belonging to savers would no longer be mixed up with the toxic sums resulting from financial deregulation. But the finance...