Corruption, kleptocracy: when these concepts are evoked, luxury cars, a voracious hunger for real estate, or extravagant wardrobes come to mind. To look beyond these appearances requires an uncommon discipline and method. It is on this civic negligence that plutocrats thrive. It is in this blind spot that the entire arsenal of the fight against transnational corruption grinds to a halt.
While modern cynicism would have us believe that the accumulation of wealth is the underlying motivation of autocratic systems, the commonly accepted opinion since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is that ideologies have ceased to shape the actions of political actors. This arrogance of the democratic bloc — victorious in the Cold War — has misled us all, almost fatally. The accumulation of money facilitated by kleptocratic predatory structures is part of a political project to capture the state and erode the international system. It is not just a matter of buying this or that villa, yacht, or garment, but truly a primitive accumulation aimed at rendering the very possibility of democratic action null and void. Let us be clear: the evil does not lie in accumulating money, owning yachts, or having countless pairs of luxury shoes; those are perfectly natural appetites. The evil lies in refusing to put in effort or serve any use to obtain them. The evil lies in the inclination to hoard and commit crime in order to satiate what is natural — the evil is in that slippery slope that makes crime a lever of social advancement. We may dare a parallel between courtly love, which seeks to earn the favors of a desired person who remains free to accept or refuse, and rape, which, while satisfying a natural urge, annihilates the freedom of the desired being. It is the same with the exercise of power in kleptocratic regimes: a permanent rape of souls and bodies.
The Declaration of the Rights of humankind and the Citizen enshrines freedom, property, and resistance to oppression as the foundation of human dignity; the kleptocratic project — through systemic plunder — aims to make freedom impossible, property subject to the whim of the prince, and resistance to oppression a crime punishable by death.
Indeed, suppose no freedom, particularly economic freedom, is possible because a bribe must be paid at every step. How could we measure the common good on which social distinctions must be founded in a society of humans who are free and equal in rights?
This initial erosion is extremely prolific. It instills in individuals a taste for perjury, for scheming, and a hatred of effort. Where I come from, in the Republic of Congo, this is summed up in the school system by an odious slogan: « Read to understand, cheat to succeed. »
The social order of the kleptocratic system thus esteems the criminal over the honest person. It is ontologically in opposition to the civic ideal of the Declaration of Human Rights. It then generates a sub-law, a situational truth that fluctuates with the tyrant’s insatiable appetite. Property exists only at the pleasure of the tyrant. Where literature often speaks of the coupling of autocracy and extractive industry — without delving into mythic theogonies — we can note that this pair operates within a global anti-democratic system.
The tyrant secures mastery over a territory, forcibly relocates populations if necessary, and provides the contractual veneer that allows an extractive enterprise to sell shares on the stock exchanges of New York, Paris, London, or Hong Kong. Those shares feed pension funds, which, in turn, keep alive the retirees of post-industrial countries — people who form a majority voting bloc resistant to any reform of a system from which they are the heirs and beneficiaries. It is Jupiter devouring his children.
This property is nothing but an illusion. It is not, as property was in the past, the fruit of labor, innovation, or genius. It depends not on validation by an open, free, and competitive market but on a criminal cartel — enemy of work, murderer of innovation, and strangler of human genius.
Make no mistake: kleptocratic extractivism is not political liberalism; it is the deadly poison that, if we do not stop it, will inevitably lead us toward the extinction of the human race. It is the engine of the ecological crisis and the primary cause of all major environmental disasters (Chernobyl, the Aral Sea, the wreck of the Erika, the hole in the ozone layer, the COVID-19 pandemic, etc.). By eroding competition and enabling the dominance of cartels, its harmful effects become exponential while preventing any peaceful possibility of correcting its mistakes.
An individual caught in this system no longer has any resources of their own to resist oppression. He is reduced to the state of a slave without chains — what Friedrich Hayek already called The Road to Serfdom. He thus no longer has the material tools of citizenship, namely freedom and property. He then gradually, and finally totally, loses the immaterial tools of that status: the freedom of association and expression.
We started from the pairing of the tyrant — master of his territory — and the pension funds of post-industrial societies to convey the global nature of the kleptocratic phenomenon once we set aside the dazzling surface (real estate frenzy, luxury, etc.), an ideological superstructure appears that aims to return humankind to slavery by gradually abolishing the freedoms won in the various Declarations of human rights and Citizen whether this neo-slavery takes the form of a Chinese techno-dictatorship or a Western-style hyper-nanny state, both seek to annihilate natural rights, the only true obstacle to its expansion.
We must confront the root causes — civic apathy — rather than the superficial effects, like extravagant purchases. In this uncertain world, we must accept that the post-1945 international system, established when a large part of the planet was still under Western colonial domination, must be superseded. We should embrace the humility of the Renaissance humanists, return to our place as dwarfs on the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and accept uncertainty and free competition as bulwarks against the oppression of cartels. The task is vast but achievable. The Magnitsky Act is the first bud of this democracy of citizens.
We must restore to communities the ability to take charge of themselves at the most local level. Civic spirit ensures that, in the deepest Congolese countryside, the reflex is not to wait for the state to repair a roof or cut the grass around a health center but to do it oneself for the benefit of the village and thus distinguish oneself by the usefulness one brings to the community: service above self.
The stakes are colossal: open warfare between states has returned. The fundamentalists’ war against women is raging. The situation may seem hopeless when we observe the U.S. federal government’s withdrawal from promoting liberal democracy globally. Yet these challenges and that retreat are the best news possible. They are a call to innovation and a call to share the burden of the struggle for freedom in a more balanced way. Finally, this withdrawal of the U.S. federal government is a unique opportunity to rebuild civic spirit from the ground up, starting with the individual who makes themselves useful to their community: service above self.
Our horizon is a new Titanomachy from which, I hope, the lovers of democracy will emerge victorious and give birth to a humanist, just, and measured order.
