The gigayacht of the American Jeff Bezos (4e world fortune), baptized Koru, had just set sail last month when the Amazon founder secretly received the Legion of Honor from President Emmanuel Macron. That day, the streets of Paris and other cities in France were once again overflowing with protesters against pension reform.
The now Chevalier Bezos was at the Élysée in the company of Bernard Arnault, contemporary Croesus, who would be worth something like a third of a trillion dollars. His fortune was built on the major luxury brands. Money feeds money.
THE Koru, the largest sailboat in the world, would have cost nearly 700 million. The Dutch builder Océanco wanted to dismantle a section of the historic De Hef railway bridge in Rotterdam to bring the marvel out of its construction sites. The town hall had accepted the dismantling, but, as thousands of citizens promised to throw eggs at the Koruthe yacht was finally towed at night to another shipyard, this one open to the open sea.
The very, very niche market of pleasure craft competing in finesse and prowess has experienced a meteoric rise since the end of the 20th century.e century. Superyachts (over 100 feet long) number in the thousands and gigayachts (over 300 feet in length), by hundreds.
These floating palaces, symbols par excellence of prosperity and ostentation, become revealing mirrors of the flaws of current capitalism. On the one hand, they recall the infinite means of the ruling class of the 1%. On the other hand, they concentrate and amplify the consequences of an ecocidal lifestyle.
“In the globalized society, is it any wonder that those who have been able to accumulate the most capital cherish the oceans? asks Professor Dahlia Namian in her new essay, The Provocative Society (at Lux editor, for the involuntary irony…), devoted to “the obscenity of the rich” (this is its subtitle). “Isn’t this the perfect embodiment of the borderless space promised by the liberalization of trade? But this postmodern Eden, this paradise — fiscal, regulatory, social — is reserved for happy couple of globalization. For migrants fleeing poverty by drifting on the waves, the ocean represents one of the deadliest frontiers on earth. In Greece, in this homeland of the gods, migrants wash up by the thousands on the shores of the Aegean Sea, dead, alive, crippled, tanned, washed out. »
A healthy anger
The tone is set and maintained for 250 pages knitting around strong symbols and key themes (food, the island, travel, etc.). Mme Namian has an undeniable talent for unearthing and bringing together stories, even enlightening anecdotes, here with the story of the Forlandia colony created by Henry Ford in Brazil, there in reference to the Greek island of Hydra where Leonard Cohen had settled. on the advice of Barbara Rothschild, met at a party for happy couple to Montreal.
Professor Namian, a sociologist by training, teaches in the Department of Social Work at the University of Ottawa. Her previous books have dealt with topics related to mental health, poverty, homelessness or exclusion. The new essay shines the spotlight on the other end of the social order.
“You can’t think of the rich and the poor separately,” she says. I started this book during the pandemic, a situation that shocked me a lot. I felt anger and I expressed it in the essay when I saw that the crisis was affecting the poorest, the most destitute, the grassroots workers even more, while every day we saw the most fortunate exposing their privileges, take refuge on their yachts, their private islands, their huge second homes. »
The title of the essay, borrowed from Romain Gary (in white dog), designates “the social order which encourages such over-confidence”, where luxurious ostentation and material exhibitionism encourage consumption while a large fraction of the population does not have access to it, cannot satisfy its basic needs. The Anglos speak of wealthporn “. Let’s dare to “pornopulence”…
The haves have always existed. And were they not, if not admired, at least envied almost everywhere?
“What’s new with the provocative society is not the uninhibited exuberance, but the fact that the grotesque display of wealth no longer encounters resistance to challenge the provocation, replies the essayist . With this term, one would expect a challenge, a duel, a reaction, whereas now the rich seem to have no opponents to react to. We are in a time of quiet provocation. »
Busting the Myths
Cultural creations (television, cinema) often content themselves with exposing overinflated moguls as the consequences of a vice, of immorality. Ultimately, this cynicism reinforces the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the powerful without too much scratching the aura enjoyed by this upper high class globalized.
“We attribute a lot of virtues to the rich,” says Professor Namian. We see them as entrepreneurs, visionaries who have built their fortune thanks to their genius and their talent. We also praise their generosity. They are made into demi-gods. Obviously, since our money-based society worships accumulation and consumption. This is true in Quebec as well. »
In fact, the myth of meritocracy plays little role. Fortune feeds itself, and inheritance remains one of the best ways to profit. Yes, Jeff Bezos started from nothing to accumulate too much, but he did it thanks to the work of hundreds of thousands of employees, and the following generations of Bezos for centuries and centuries will live in the splendor bequeathed.
The professor reminds us that the differences in wealth are constantly increasing on a planetary scale. In March, the magazine Forbes listed 1426 billionaires in the world, all together worth almost 7000 billion dollars, or almost three times the GDP of Canada, a country ranking 4e ranks in the world for its number of billionaires (about 65 in total) as a proportion of its population.
Another myth is that the money at the top will eventually trickle down to the bottom of the pyramid and that the “golden nuggets” will end up in the pockets of the poor. “This theory does not hold water either, sums up the sociologist. The reverse has been happening for years. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the foundations that allowed the middle class to thrive are being challenged in different ways. »
The conclusion is obvious for the specialist in inequalities: it is necessary to take up and update the critique of capitalism. “We have to start talking about social class again,” she said. Large fortunes must be taxed. »
According to Oxfam’s calculations, if Canada introduced an additional wealth tax of 2% for millionaires, 3% for those with more than 50 million and 5% for billionaires, it would raise 50 billion. dollars annually.
And come what may…