Posted on May 31, 2010 by dandelionsalad
by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
May 31, 2010
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
see
Michel Chossudovsky: The Homeland Security State and the Economical Crisis
The Greeks Get It by Chris Hedges
Theology and Neoliberal Economics by Prof. Michael Hudson
John Bellamy Foster: The Crisis of Capital: Economy, Ecology and Empire (must-see)
The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
May 31, 2010
Image by Sterneck via Flickr
The witch hunts against communists in the United States were used to
silence socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who defied the
abuses of capitalism. Those “anti-Red” actions were devastating blows to
the political health of the country. The communists spoke the language
of class war. They understood that Wall Street, along with corporations
such as British Petroleum, is the enemy. They offered a broad social
vision which allowed even the non-communist left to employ a vocabulary
that made sense of the destructive impulses of capitalism. But
once the Communist Party, along with other radical movements, was
eradicated as a social and political force, once the liberal class took
government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for
phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense
of our struggle. We became fearful, timid and ineffectual. We lost our
voice and became part of the corporate structure we should have been
dismantling.
Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of
the language of class conflict. It 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 speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to
grasp, as Marx 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, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that
seek justice for working men and women. They worship only 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 nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico is the
perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same nightmare seen
in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in New England to the
abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis
and Afghans, mourning their dead, live each day.
Capitalism was once viewed in America as a system that had to be
fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. And so, even as Wall
Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars and the Gulf of Mexico is
turned into a toxic swamp, we do not know what to do or say. We decry
the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the
corporate state. The liberal class has a misguided loyalty, illustrated
by environmental groups that have refused to excoriate the Obama White
House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Liberals
bow before a Democratic Party that ignores them and does the bidding of
corporations. The reflexive deference to the Democrats by the liberal
class is the result of cowardice and fear. It is also the result of an
infantile understanding of the mechanisms of power. The divide is not
between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate
state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers.
And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.
Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class
warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political
rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated
partners of the capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple
bartering tools. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century
that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the
eight-hour day and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities,
especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the
discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and have no new ideas.
Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely
self-absorbed narcissism. The Democratic Party and the press have become
corporate servants. The loss of radicals within the labor movement, the
Democratic Party, the arts, the church and the universities has
obliterated one of the most important counterweights to the corporate
state. And the purging of those radicals has left us unable to make
sense of what is happening to us.
The fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism, has
resulted in the steady suspension of civil liberties, including freedom
of speech, habeas corpus and the right to organize, values the liberal
class claims to support. It was the orchestration of fear that permitted
the capitalist class to ram through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948 in the
name of anti-communism, the most destructive legislative blow to the
working class until the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It
was fear that created the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, offshore
penal colonies where we torture and the endless wars in the Middle
East. And it was fear that was used to see us fleeced by Wall Street. If
we do not stop being afraid and name our enemy we will continue toward a
state of neofeudalism.
The robber barons of the late 19th century used goons and thugs to
beat up workers and retain control. The corporations, employing the
science of public relations, have use actors, artists, writers, scholars
and filmmakers to manipulate and shape public opinion. Corporations
employ the college-educated, liberal elite to saturate the culture with
lies. The liberal class should have defied the emasculation of radical
organizations, including the Communist Party. Instead, it was lured into
the corporate embrace. It became a class of collaborators. National
cohesion, because our intellectual life has become so impoverished,
revolves around the empty pursuits of mass culture, brands, consumption,
status and the bland uniformity of opinions disseminated by
corporate-friendly courtiers. We speak and think in the empty slogans
and clichés we are given. And they are given to us by the liberal class.
The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe pointed out in his essay “The Age of Conformity,”
“the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be
realized by a commercial civilization—has gradually lost its allure.
And, it is this, rather than the abandonment of a particular program,
which constitutes our rout.” The belief that capitalism is the
unassailable engine of human progress, Howe added, “is trumpeted through
every medium of communication: official propaganda, institutional
advertising and scholarly writings of people who, until a few years ago,
were its major opponents.”
“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals—the new realists—who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,”
Howe wrote.
“For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades—as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’—that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals. The institutional world needs intellectuals because they are intellectuals but it does not want them as intellectuals. It beckons to them because of what they are but it will not allow them, at least within its sphere of articulation, either to remain or entirely cease being what they are. It needs them for their knowledge, their talent, their inclinations and passions; it insists that they retain a measure of these endowments, which it means to employ for its own ends, and without which the intellectuals would be of no use to it whatever. A simplified but useful equation suggests itself: the relation of the institutional world to the intellectuals is as the relation of middlebrow culture to serious culture, the one battens on the other, absorbs and raids it with increasing frequency and skill, subsidizes and encourages it enough to make further raids possible—at times the parasite will support its victim. Surely this relationship must be one reason for the high incidence of neurosis that is supposed to prevail among intellectuals. A total estrangement from the sources of power and prestige, even a blind unreasoning rejection of every aspect of our culture, would be far healthier if only because it would permit a free discharge of aggression.”
The liberal class prefers comfort to confrontation. It will not
challenge the decaying structures of the corporate state. It is
intolerant within its ranks of those who do. It clings pathetically to
the carcass of the Obama presidency. It has been exposed as a dead force
in American politics. We must find our way back to the old radicals, to
the discredited Marxists, socialists and anarchists, including Dwight
Macdonald and Dorothy Day. Language is our first step toward salvation.
We cannot fight what we cannot describe.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).
see
Michel Chossudovsky: The Homeland Security State and the Economical Crisis
The Greeks Get It by Chris Hedges
Theology and Neoliberal Economics by Prof. Michael Hudson
John Bellamy Foster: The Crisis of Capital: Economy, Ecology and Empire (must-see)
The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2
