Why I Am a Socialist Posted on Dec 29, 2008
By Chris Hedges
The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us
into a depression will not be contained by the two main political
parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more
than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and
corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at
deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will
either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising
democratic socialism-one that will insist on massive government relief
and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies,
a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the
outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military
budget and an end to imperial wars-or we will continue to be fleeced and
impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our
surveillance state.
The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide
prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our
corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell
pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia.
?A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial,? Orwell wrote, ?that is when its ruling class has lost
its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.?
Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.
There is a political shift in Europe toward an open confrontation with
the corporate state. Germany has seen a surge of support for Die Linke
(The Left), a political grouping formed 18 months ago. It is co-led by
the veteran socialist ?Red? Oskar Lafontaine, who has built his
career on attacking big business. Two-thirds of Germans in public
opinion polls say they agree with all or some of Die Linke?s platform.
The Socialist Party of the Netherlands is on the verge of overtaking the
Labor Party as the main opposition party on the left. Greece, beset with
street protests and violence by disaffected youths, has seen the rapid
rise of the Coalition of the Radical Left. In Spain and Norway
socialists are in power. Resurgence is not universal, especially in
France and Britain, but the shifts toward socialism are significant.
Corporations have intruded into every facet of life. We eat corporate
food. We buy corporate clothes. We drive corporate cars. We buy our
vehicular fuel and our heating oil from corporations. We borrow from
corporate banks. We invest our retirement savings with corporations. We
are entertained, informed and branded by corporations. We work for
corporations. The creation of a mercenary army, the privatization of
public utilities and our disgusting for-profit health care system are
all legacies of the corporate state. These corporations have no loyalty
to America or the American worker. They are not tied to nation states.
They are vampires.
?By now the [commercial] revolution has deprived the mass of
consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing,
shelter, food, even water,? Wendell Berry wrote in ?The Unsettling
of America.? ?Air remains the only necessity that the average user
can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on
that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and
final than military defeat.?
The corporation is designed to make money without regard to human life,
the social good or impact on the environment. Corporate laws impose a
legal duty on corporate executives to make as much money as possible for
shareholders, although many have moved on to fleece shareholders as
well. In the 2003 documentary film ?The Corporation? the management
guru Peter Drucker says: ?If you find an executive who wants to take
on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.?
A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that
tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its
profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives
consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the
investment manager, says in the film: ?The corporation is an
externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing
machine. There isn?t any question of malevolence or of will. The
enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those
characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.?
Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world?s largest
commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a ?present day
instrument of destruction? because of its compulsion to ?externalize
any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to
externalize.?
?The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and
waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,?
Anderson says.
In short, the film, based on Joel Bakan?s book ?The Corporation:
The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,? asserts that the
corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people clinically
defined as psychopaths.
Psychologist Dr. Robert Hare lists in the film psychopathic traits and
ties them to the behavior of corporations:
callous unconcern for the feelings for others; incapacity to maintain
enduring relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others;
deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit; incapacity
to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with respect to
lawful behavior.
And yet, under the American legal system, corporations have the same
legal rights as individuals. They give hundreds of millions of dollars
to political candidates, fund the army of some 35,000 lobbyists in
Washington and thousands more in state capitals to write corporate-
friendly legislation, drain taxpayer funds and abolish government
oversight. They saturate the airwaves, the Internet, newsprint and
magazines with advertisements promoting their brands as the friendly
face of the corporation. They have high-priced legal teams, millions of
employees, skilled public relations firms and thousands of elected
officials to ward off public intrusions into their affairs or halt messy
lawsuits. They hold a near monopoly on all electronic and printed
sources of information. A few media giants-AOL-Time Warner, General
Electric, Viacom, Disney and Rupert Murdoch?s NewsGroup- control
nearly everything we read, see and hear.
?Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a] few hands,
partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because
technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage
the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the
smaller ones,? Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the Monthly Review in
explaining why he was a socialist. ?The result of these developments
is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be
effectively checked even by a democratically organized political
society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are
selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced
by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the
electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the
representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the
interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover,
under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control,
directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio,
education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases
quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective
conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.?
Labor and left-wing activists, especially university students and well-
heeled liberals, have failed to unite. This division, which is often
based on social rather than economic differences, has long stymied
concerted action against ruling elites. It has fractured the American
left and rendered it impotent.
?Large sections of the middle class are being gradually
proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any
rate not in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook,? Orwell
wrote in 1937 during the last economic depression. ?Here I am, for
instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which
class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it
is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member
of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I
side with, the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of
existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is
probable that I, personally, in any important issue, would side with the
working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of
others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that
far larger class, running into millions this time-the office-workers and
black-coated employees of all kinds- whose traditions are less definite
middle class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them
proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same
enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the
same system. Yet how many of them realize it? When the pinch came nearly
all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought
to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a working class crushed
down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly
anti-working- class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made
Fascist party.?
Coalitions of environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist,
sustainable-agriculture and anti-globalization forces have coalesced in
Europe to form and support socialist parties. This has yet to happen in
the United States. The left never rallied in significant numbers behind
Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. In picking the lesser of two evils, it
threw its lot in with a Democratic Party that backs our imperial wars,
empowers the national security state and does the bidding of
corporations.
If Barack Obama does not end the flagrant theft of taxpayer funds by
corporate slugs and the disgraceful abandonment of our working class,
especially as foreclosures and unemployment mount, many in the country
will turn in desperation to the far right embodied by groups such as
Christian radicals. The failure by the left to offer a democratic
socialist alternative will mean there will be, in the eyes of many
embittered and struggling working- and middle-class Americans, no
alternative but a perverted Christian fascism. The inability to
articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will
ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian
capitalism.
