VI. HISTORY, A POLITICAL TOOL

THE (RARE) HISTORIANS WHO STRESS UNDERLYING ECONOMIES KNOW THAT IT IS, THOSE WHO STRESS INDIVIDUALS OR PHILOSOPHIES MAY NOT 

Setting events in their long-term economic context and recognizing the importance of insurrections leads to thinking differently about own times.

Stressing prominent people or philosophies does not. As well, emphasis on leaders reinforces individualism and potentially authoritarianism, while stress on ideas unconnected with their underlying impact favors propaganda. 

Proof of those practical effects: Emphasis on economies and upheavals appeared briefly in the U.S. during the Vietnam War, and in France for a generation after the discredit of right-wing collaborationists after World War II. Stress on individuals and philosophies coincides the dominance of the right, in the U.S. with the Cold War* and in France with the rise of multinationals from about 1980.

*Personal memory: Classes in modern European intellectual history at Vassar College and Russian history in the Soviet Union Program at Harvard did not mention Marx and his insistence the underlying economy even once. 

The conservative view of the past is part of a general ambiance, whose aspects reinforced each other and, as in Old Regime France, are so rooted as to be invisible. Ads, particularly those that with the rise of multinationals hover over great cities,* indicate the wanted mindset:

*First noticed in Paris in 2011.

           Richard Nahem, Eye Prefer Paris, 2020

     Union Square in Manhattan, 2025 / Elisabeth Rawson

They glamorize...

• Irrationality: No reason is given for buying the product. The brand logo is enough. The mindlessness leads to discrediting expertise and to accepting authority.

Châtelet crossroad in central Paris, June 2022

• Isolation: Buying the brand temporarily stills the loneliness that capitalism heightens by breaking social bonds. The idealized figures substitute the individual for the community and are barriers to joining others in protest. 

Top of the Hotel Lutetia in the elegant 7th arrondissement.

• Voids. Nothing outside the product exists, just as nothing beyond the postcard image of Paris exists — and recently, not even that:

The Opéra

The Big Brother images express a mentality in ways so omnipresent that they become invisible. That explains the myopia that leads most Parisians and visitors to ignore oddities that should jump out at them: the long, wide, straight streets that lead to voids that are much too vast for traffic, the references to Louis XIV at Napoleon's tomb, the painting of an orgy that covers the ceiling of the salon at the heart of the Opéra... .

The way in which we usually view the past is one of those ways. Like the humble under France's Old Regime who insulted each other with "your father was a valet!", historians do not realize that they strengthen the system that subjugates them.

# # #

Old Regime acceptance of hierarchy changed when the economy did: "What gave you all that wealth? You took the trouble to be born." That may be happening now.

Take a huge panel on a métro wall made in 2024, which by recalling the victorious combat for the eight-hour day breaks in a is a spectacular way from the mainstream:

 

The station is part of the extension of the métro line that connects Orly international airport in the south with the stadium in Saint-Denis in the north. Built for the 2024 Olympics, thousands of  soccer fans pass it at every game.

Dark colors express that fight...

Bright ones celebrate a victory that improves lives now. 

It was commissioned by the Social-Democrat government of working-class Saint-Denis — woken up from its sleep? — and coincides with continuous protests. These three, arbitrarily chosen, took place over the weekend of November 29-30, 2025, dates also arbitrarily chosen:*

*They were when I was writing this page.

 Saturday, November 29, 2025 (Cecilia Fabiano/ La Presse via AP / zoom

Pro-Palestine demonstrations in Paris, London, Geneva, Lisbon, Dublin, Rome...

Status Coup News, Saturday, November 29, 2025 / zoom

One of the innumerable demonstrations that oppose arrests of black and brown people in American cities on the pretext of deporting violent criminals. People who may so far have been a-political meet in front of the hotels where the deporting thugs are staying, and bang on pots and pans, in the cold, until 3a.m. to keep them from sleeping. 

 Al Jazeera, Sunday November 30, 2025 / zoom

In Manilla, demands that the President resign because of graft.

There were no demonstrations in Paris that weekend, but they took place again the next Tuesday and have continued, off and on, ever since.

Local factors are the immediate reason for the protests, but globalized capitalism underlies them: It destroys an entire society to build a riviera for billionaires in Gaza and colonize the area behind it, reinforce oligarchs' control of the economy by heightening racial tension in the U.S., takes corruption to unimagined levels in the Philippines as elsewhere. Universally, it blows away the most deeply held beliefs and most basic social ties:

Harald Wolff

The struggle is increasingly between über-capitalism backed by far-right parties and democratic socialists providing solutions to the problems that face us all. 

Showing what's said and what's left out in one city is the reason for writing these blooks. Please tell me what you think via the space below — other points of view are especially welcome.

Harald Wolff

If you find these pages useful,

please pass them on.

*    *    *

*Economic forces are not always the explanation (for example, they do account for the  religious fanaticism that swept most of 16th-century Europe, but not that of Ireland).

** Those of the poor against the rich usually failed, but can be important for the memories they leave. Those of rising economic forces against traditional interests often won, but that is rarely said.