Translated from the French by Tom Sunic

Below is the interview A. de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

Q: Despite repeated promises of politicians, both from the right and the left, nothing seems to be stopping the rise in unemployment. Is it something inevitable?

A: Officially, there are 3.5 million unemployed in France, which means that the unemployment rate stands today at 10.3%. This figure, however, varies depending on how it is being computed. The official statistics take into account only the category “A”, i.e.  those who are unemployed and who are actively looking for a job, while leaving out the categories “B”, “C”, “D” and “E”, i.e. those looking for a job although having had some reduced work activity as of lately; those who have stopped looking for a job but are still unemployed; those receiving training; those in traineeship; those working under “subsidized contracts”, etc. When adding together all these categories, one reaches the real unemployment rate of 21.1% (more than double the official figure). If we refer to the overall rate of the inactive population of working age, then we arrive at 35.8%. Moreover, if we were to take into account insecure, part-time, or short-term jobs, as well as the number of the “working poor”, etc., then this figure keeps getting higher.

Undoubtedly, changes in unemployment depend on the official policies—but only to some extent. Today’s unemployment is no longer of a cyclical nature, but primarily structural, something many have not fully understood yet. This means that work is becoming a scarce commodity. The jobs that have been lost are less and less being replaced by other job openings. Of course, the expansion of the service sector is real; yet the service sector does not generate capital. Moreover, twenty years down the road almost half of those service sector jobs will be replaced by networked machines. To imagine, therefore, that someday we shall return to full employment is an illusion. Read more

The God Hermes slaying the hundred-eyed monster Argus (figure on vase, c. 5th B.C.)

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic

Q: Radar on the roads, security cameras at every street corner. One gets a big impression of being constantly under surveillance.  With the recently adopted law on intelligence gathering, how far can these freedom curbing measures still go?

A: The new law allows the installation of “black boxes” on internet networks and servers which operate with the technologies of “deep packet inspection” and which enable the monitoring of private conversations on the internet, as well as the interception and scanning of all communications the goal of which is to detect, by means of secretly kept algorithms, all “suspicious” words and every “unusual” behavior. This law also allows, without any need to seek court approval, the wiring up of homes, computer hacking in order to siphon off their contents, the use of portable “IMSI-catchers” (false antenna relays intercepting telephone calls in a specific perimeter), the “key loggers” (software for reading in real time what a person types on his keyboard), vehicle tagging, geolocation of people and objects, etc.

The “black boxes” also allow the analyses of all the “metadata “, that is to say, to keep track of all traces left behind by a person using the phone or the internet. Any data value, being proportional to the square of the data number to which it is connected, the growing collection of the “metadata” thus enables not only how to predict the behavior of a group of individuals with their specific characteristics, but also to prod into every aspect of citizens’ lives: their relationship, their mail, their social networking habits, their banking transactions, their travels, purchases, subscriptions, lifestyle, age, political views, etc. Read more