Posted on Oct 17, 2011
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| AP / Ted S. Warren |
Protesters in Seattle melt a Bank of America debit card.
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By Chris Hedges
There is no danger that the
protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation
in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic
Party or groups like MoveOn. The
faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights
of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement
because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down
salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away
rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic
politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of
“liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked
to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics
and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.
Resistance, real resistance, to the
corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters,
clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of
Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed
attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises. These protesters
in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal”
establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. And it was deeply
moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall
Street. It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”
Tinkering with the corporate state will not
work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental
catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical
message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the
power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to
thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated
with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of
Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that
liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all
along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves
without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the
protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park
signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather
than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal
establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all
radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It
proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt
systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives
regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of
responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is
not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no
resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or
run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to
use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has
no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a
real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our
dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings.
Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed
by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic
forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than
simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices. King too was a
radical. He would not compromise on nonviolence, racism or justice. He
understood that movements—such as the Liberty Party, which fought
slavery, the suffragists, who fought for women’s rights, the labor
movement and the civil rights movement—have always been the true
correctives in American democracy. None of those movements achieved
formal political power. But by holding fast to moral imperatives they
made the powerful fear them. King knew that racial equality was
impossible without economic justice and an end to militarism. And he had
no intention of ceding to the demands of the liberal establishment that
called on him to be calm and patience.
“For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing
institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there,”
King said shortly before he was assassinated. “Now I feel quite
differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire
system, a revolution of values.”
King was killed in 1968 when he was in
Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers. By then he had begun
to say that his dream, the one that the corporate state has frozen into a
few safe clichés from his 1963 speech in Washington, had turned into a
nightmare. King called at the end of his life for massive federal funds
to rebuild inner cities, what he called “a radical redistribution of
economic and political power,” a complete restructuring of “the
architecture of American society.” He grasped that the inequities of
capitalism had become the instrument by which the poor would always
remain poor.
“Call it democracy, or call it democratic
socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of
wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”
On the eve of King’s murder he was
preparing to organize a poor people’s march on Washington, D.C.,
designed to cause “major, massive dislocations,” a nonviolent demand by
the poor, including the white underclass, for a system of economic
equality. It would be 43 years before his vision was realized by an
eclectic group of protesters who gathered before the gates of Wall
Street.
The truth of America is understood only
when you listen to voices in our impoverished rural enclaves, prisons
and the urban slums, when you hear the words of our unemployed, those
who have lost their homes or cannot pay their medical bills, our elderly
and our children, especially the quarter of the nation’s children who
depend on food stamps to eat, and all who are marginalized. There is
more reality expressed about the American experience by the
debt-burdened young men and women protesting in the parks than by all
the chatter of the well-paid pundits and experts that pollutes the
airwaves.
What kind of nation is it that spends far
more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it
does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind
of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage
while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons
and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill
onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its
unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What
kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate
its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the
destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our
children and our children’s children?
“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”
“The black vote mean [nothing],” the rapper Nas intones. “Who you gunna elect/ Satan or Satan?/ In the hood nothing is changing/ We ain’t got no choices.”
Or listen to hip-hop artist Talib Kweli: “Back in the ’60s, there was a
big push for black … politicians, and now we have more than we ever had
before, but our communities are so much worse. A lot of people died for
us to vote, I’m aware of that history, but these politicians are not in
touch with people at all. Politics is not the truth to me, it’s an
illusion.”
The liberal class functions in a
traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough
steam to keep the system intact. It makes piecemeal and incremental
reform possible. This is what happened during the Great Depression and
the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that
he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are
at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King,
especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky
or Ralph Nader.
The stupidity of the corporate state is
that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it
could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no
impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it
functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the
liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty
rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and
outlets. Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate
pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to
meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over.
Human history has amply demonstrated that
once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet
retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally
discarded. The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions
of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional
role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised
appendage of corporate power. And as the engines of corporate power
pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there
will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no
purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by
both the corporate state and radical dissidents. The best it can do is
attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to
replace it.
An ineffectual liberal class means there is
no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of
power. It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and
the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie
outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a
liberal democracy. By emasculating the liberal class, which once ensured
that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate
state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and
political charades. It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness
that the liberal class offered to the power elite.
Liberal institutions, including the church,
the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor
unions, set the parameters for limited self-criticism in a functioning
democracy as well as small, incremental reforms. The liberal class is
permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human
rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality
and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the
conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public
virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as
fundamentally good.
But the liberal class, by having refused to
question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and
globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the
roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have
prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power
elite. The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed
itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate
dominance. All hope lies now with those in the street.
Liberals
lack the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market
ideologies. They have no ideological alternatives even as the Democratic
Party openly betrays every principle the liberal class claims to
espouse, from universal health care to an end to our permanent war
economy to a demand for quality and affordable public education to a
return of civil liberties to a demand for jobs and welfare of the
working class. The corporate state forced the liberal class to join in
the nation’s death march that began with the presidency of Ronald
Reagan. Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money, accelerated
the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our regulatory
agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the
empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy. The liberal
class, stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied
institutions, where it busied itself with the boutique activism of
political correctness and embraced positions it had previously
condemned.
Russell Jacoby
writes: “The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now
honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass
culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left
once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at
them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it
worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the
left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”
Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism
comes with the return of the language of class conflict and rebellion,
language that has been purged from the lexicon of the liberal class,
language that defines this new movement. This does not mean we have to
agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the
state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the
working class, but we have to learn again to speak in the vocabulary
Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that
corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit,
pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw
poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to
make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance
programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the
U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for
working men and women. They worship money and power. And, as Marx knew,
unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and
greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The dead zone
in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state.
It is part of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill
towns of New England and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio. It is a
nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, living in terror and
mourning their dead, endure daily.
What took place early Friday morning in
Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in a long struggle for justice. It
signaled a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular
pressure. And it was carried out by ordinary men and women who sleep at
night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food and have
nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage. It is
they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation. And if
we join them we might have a chance.
