Switzerland: the Awful Truth

Introduction

One thing I have learned and I know it in your stead

Dying myself :

How can I say it - there’s something inside you

And it won’t come out ! What do you know in your wisdom

That has no consequences ? …

Oh, goodness without consequences ! Intentions in the dark !

I have changed nothing.

Swiftly vanishing without fear from this world

I say to you :

Take care that when you leave the world

You were not only good but are leaving

A good world !

History catches us wherever we are born. I was born in Switzerland. In Les Rendez-vous manqués, Régis Debray talks about the “summons of the imagination” [1] that draws together all the critical minds and revolutionary wills of a nation and an era into a single plan of action. I do not believe that any such “summons” exists today in Switzerland. Nor do I believe there is such a thing as History there, in the accepted sense of the word. To be precise, I think that the summons and the history are something residual and hesitant, present only in the mind, lived in the imagination by way of events elsewhere. My endeavour throughout this book is to bring them out into the open, to get them out from under the stifling and alienating blanket of fog which is produced by the ruling discourse and produces the silence and uniformity of consent.

For over a hundred and fifty years, a close-knit oligarchy that has never had a Vichy to cope with, and has therefore never been unmasked, has ruled a state and a people whose legislation, ideological system and bureaucratic machine are perfectly suited to its needs. Thanks to a monstrously hypertrophied banking system, as well as to the admirable institutions of banking secrecy and the [8] numbered account, the Swiss oligarchy functions as a fence for the world capitalist system. With its daily takings it finances its own foreign ventures ; Swiss multinational companies today control whole regions and populations - from Indonesia to South Africa, from Brazil to Guatemala. Switzerland is the only industrial state in Europe whose balance of trade with the poor nations is consistently in surplus. In the worldwide imperialist system, the banking barons of Geneva and Zürich also fulfil many other functions : they contributed to crushing Allende’s Chile by first cutting down, then cutting off, its international sources of credit. They “stabilized” and then reinforced the racist dictatorships in South Africa and Rhodesia, and the totalitarian régimes in Bolivia and Indonesia. But the Swiss banking barons have won their most outstanding victory of all in the sphere of the ideological class struggle : by means of their superlative international propaganda machine and their corruption of large sectors of the political classes at home, they have managed to identify their strategy of pillage and receiving stolen goods with the national interest of the Swiss state and people. Speechifying incessantly about neutrality and peace, their faces half hidden by the flag of the Red Cross, the banking barons - cold monsters - succeed in persuading other nations as well as their own native subjects that they are philanthropists : rich, of course, but peace-loving and virtuous.

Why have I written this book ? The worldwide imperialist system is “concrete absolute evil”, in the Hegelian sense of the term. It dominates and ravages three-quarters of mankind today. I was born in the brain of the monster, at the “privileged” core of the system. I intend to fight it from there.

“Whatever is, is false,” said Max Horkheimer. What is false in our world ? In a rare moment of self-criticism Robert S. MacNamara, president of the World Bank and one of the major imperialist leaders, revealed the following figures :

That half of the 2 000 000 000 people in the world who live in the underdeveloped countries suffer from hunger or malnutrition. Twenty to twenty-five per cent of their children die before the age of five. Of those that survive, thousands live an impoverished life because of brain damage, arrested growth or low vitality due to an inadequate diet. 800 000 000 are illiterate ; despite foreseeable progress in education, there will be even more illiterates among their children… The average life-expectancy in the underdeveloped countries is twenty years less than in rich countries. One-third of the world’s population (the industrial nations) has seven-eighths of the world’s income, while the remaining two-thirds have to make do with the other eighth. [2]

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As I say, there is only the faintest summons to be heard in Switzerland. I cannot claim to be the spokesman of a party, or a trade union or even of the Swiss workers’ movement ; I can only speak for a little-known fraction of that movement, on the basis of an ill-defined solidarity and will to unity, in the name of what I want that movement to be and to become. There is a Left, a workers’ movement in Switzerland. But it has let itself be partly trapped in the fog of the consensus, of willing uniformity. I say partly, because its members still have some contradictory convictions, habits and rituals, and even occasionally an upsurge of contradictory activity. But, prisoners as they are of the models and values of the ruling class, they are reduced to taking one step at a time, for they have lost any total vision of what the revolutionary imagination is summoning them to.

In an earlier book, Les Vivants et la Mort, [3] I recounted my own odyssey. As a socialist parliamentarian and an academic theoretician, I am trying to fight a battle that is inseparably both theoretical and practical. This book is a result of that battle, and also a means of waging it. It is certainly not an overall sociological analysis of Switzerland. I would add - to forestall accusations of bad faith, though I fear I am wasting my time - that this book is not an attack on the institutional system (federalist, and comprising a variety of peoples, languages and cultures) brought into being by the Swiss over the course of six centuries of hard-fought history ; it is not an attempt to assess the advantages of the system, nor is it concerned with making a sociological study of any aspects of Switzerland not directly connected with the understanding of the imperialist problem. Nor does it formulate a left political programme of any kind. Based on my personal experience, at home and abroad, it is a “sociography”, so to speak, of the ruling capitalist class of Switzerland, of how that class operates today in its own country and in the world, how it is linked with the other imperialist oligarchies.

Our planet is a cemetery which the imperialist oligarchies are working to fill daily with more victims. I know one particular oligarchy extremely well, the one working from Switzerland. I want to show how it goes about its work. And at the same time, I want to show how this oligarchy makes Switzerland, as a nation and as a people, dependent on imperialism.

There is no doubt that imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is at present in “crisis”. [4] But the “crisis” is one of reconstruction and adaptation, not of death. I can see at least two reasons for this :

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1. Since decolonization, the hegemonic capital of the centre (that is, of the industrialized countries) has become more and more a worldwide phenomenon, and has thus effected a qualitative change in the social landscape of our planet. We are all familiar with Lenin’s classic definition of the origins of the system of world domination and the practice of imperialism. [5] Since he formulated that theory, the major agent of imperialist aggression against the nations on the periphery (i.e. the Third World countries), the nature of the relationship of dependence it establishes in the three dependent continents, and its strategy of exploitation, have all changed. The chief aggressor against the poor nations today is no longer the capitalist state as conqueror, protector or trustee - as foreseen by Lenin - but a capitalist system that transcends state boundaries. This system operates without using - or at least not to the same extent as before - its former instrument, the state. [6] The specific social entity born of the change is the transnational or multinational company. [7]

The motive force of the multinational company is profit, and its social strategy is a continuing extension of its power over people and things. In the three dependent continents, as in the various countries at the centre, the multinational companies are tending to eliminate gradually the competition among themselves. (This is made definitely easier by the gradual abolition of competition among the various state systems. Peaceful coexistence between the USSR and the USA, to say nothing of the many mutual security agreements made between the two powers and their satellites, furthers the imperialist domination of many areas in the Third World. In other words, imperialism adopts certain rules for exercising its domination, and these rules reinforce that domination. This vital fact underlies the considerations that will emerge in my concluding chapter about the respective roles of the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle in Switzerland and in Europe.

2. Having sustained certain setbacks in their fight to keep control of raw materials - defeated in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, and harassed by revolutionary forces (though these are still in a minority) in their own homelands - the imperialist oligarchies are today redeploying their forces. A number of questions need answering, in no particular order. In practical terms, what is the position of the international workers’ movement today ? On the chessboard of international relations, what is the policy of the socialist states and how great is their power ? Inside the capitalist [11] powers at the centre, what positions have been won by the revolutionary forces ? On the periphery, which are the bastions held by anti-imperialist forces, and which nations are achieving the material means to liberate themselves ? [8] In theoretical terms, what positions have been won from the standpoint of the class struggle ? And finally, what level has anti-imperialist consciousness reached at the periphery and at the centre ? [9] I shall not of course be answering all these questions. But they underlie everything I write, and by analysing the case of Switzerland, I hope to contribute to finding some of the answers.

I make no claim - nor would I have the ability - to present a coherent and definitive theory of secondary imperialism, based on one man’s analysis of one case. For at least two further reasons, this can be no more than a contribution. In the first place, secondary imperialism is caught up in the present crisis of primary imperialism, and is therefore in a state of flux ; neither its new strategy nor the means available to it can yet be identified to any precise degree. In the second place, there is a strange invisibility about the activities of the secondary oligarchy. Given the absence of detailed statistics for investments and profits, the purposely vague or actually false reports given to shareholders, and the refusal of most senior management in such companies to answer enquiries, I am obliged to form my hypothesis on the basis of very inadequate information.

However, I have received invaluable help from four experts who have allowed me to use passages from their own recent work, giving statistics, dates of enquiries, and so on, with which to supplement or support my theoretical analyses. The extracts taken from Delia Castelnuovo-Frigessi come from “Colonialismo a domicilio : i lavoratori stranieri in Svizzera”, Il Ponte, 1974, pp. 1447-79. Those from Heinz Hollenstein are from “Die Entwicklungspolitik des schweizerischen Staates”, in the review Civitas, vol. xxix, no. 1/2, October 1973, and no. 3, November 1973. Those from Beat Kappeler come from “Schweizerische Finanz und Dritte Welt” ; and those from Rudolf H. Strahm come from “Schweizer Industrielkapital und Dritte Welt” : these last two are taken from Schweizer Kapital und Dritte Welt, published by Erklarung von Bern, Zürich. I would warn readers that at times, because of the context in which I quote them, these extracts suggest an interpretation which their authors would not fully accept. This is especially the case with the passages from Beat Kappeler, which have been slightly modified, and those from Heinz Hollenstein, which are not representative of his work in general. They are used essentially to [12] illustrate my argument, and I make no claim to associate their authors with my conclusions.

I have also received much help from the reference department of the Federal Assembly in Berne, from colleagues in the United Nations Library and from the Institute of Development Studies in Geneva. I am especially grateful to Professor David Handley who agreed to read the English version of the manuscript and offered his helpful suggestions, and to Rosemary Sheed Middleton for her excellent translation of the book. And I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mme Micheline Bonnet for revising and tidying up my original text.

J.Z.

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Notes to Introduction

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