By Jonathan Cook
February 24, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - If one thing drives me to write, especially these
blog posts, it is the urgent need for us to start
understanding power. Power is the force that shapes
almost everything about our lives and our deaths.
There is no more important issue. Understanding
power and overcoming it through that
understanding is the only path to liberation we
can take as individuals, as societies, and as a
species.
Which is why it should be simply
astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a
free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses
matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party
politics and celebrity scandals.
And yet, of course, the lack of interest in
analysing and understanding power is not surprising
at all. Because the corporate media is the key
tool – or seen another way, the central expression –
of power.
Very obviously the main concern of power is the
ability to conceal itself. Its exposure as power
weakens it, by definition. Once exposed, power faces
questions about its legitimacy, its methods, its
purposes. Power does not want to be seen, it does
not want to be confined, it does not want to be held
accountable. It wants absolute freedom to reproduce
itself, and ideally to amass more power.
That is why true power makes itself as invisible
and as inscrutable as it can. Like a mushroom, power
can grow only in darkness. That is why it is the
hardest thing to write about in ways that are
intelligible to those under its spell, which is most
of us, most of the time. Because power coopts
language, words are inadequate to the task of
describing the story of real power.
Ripples on the surface
Notice I refer to power, not the
powerful, because power should be understood
more as an idea made flesh, an ideological matrix of
structures, a way of understanding the world, than a
set of people or a cabal. It has its own logic
separate from the people who are considered
powerful. Yes, politicians, celebrities, royalty,
bankers and CEOs are part of its physical
expression. But they are not power, precisely
because those individuals are visible. The very
visibility of their power makes them vulnerable and
potentially expendable – the very opposite of power.
The current predicaments of Prince Andrew in
Britain or Harvey Weinstein in the US are
illustrative of the vagaries of being powerful,
while telling us little meaningful about power
itself. Conversely, there is a truth in the
self-serving story of those in power – the
corporate executives of an Exxon or a BP – who note
on the rare occasions when they face a little
scrutiny that if they refused to do their jobs, to
oversee the destruction of the planet, someone else
would quickly step in to fill their shoes.
Rather than thinking in terms of individuals,
power is better visualised as the deep waters of a
lake, while the powerful are simply the ripples on
the surface. The ripples come and go, but the vast
body of water below remains untouched.
Superficially, the means by which power conceals
itself is through stories. Its needs narratives –
mainly about those who appear powerful – to create
political and social dramas that distract us from
thinking about deep power. But more fundamentally
still, power depends on ideology. Ideology cloaks
power – in a real sense, it is power –
because it is the source of power’s invisibility.
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Ideology provides the assumptions that drive our
perceptions of the world, that prevent us from
questioning why some people were apparently born to
rule, or have been allowed to enclose vast estates
of what was once everyone’s land, or hoard masses of
inherited wealth, or are celebrated for exploiting
large numbers of workers, or get away with choking
the planet to the point at which life itself
asphyxiates.
Phrased like that, none of these practices seems
natural. In fact, to a visiting Martian they would
look pathologically insane, an irrefutable proof of
our self-destructiveness as a species. But these
conditions are the unexamined background to our
lives , just the way things are and maybe always
were. The system.
True, the individuals who benefit from the social
and economic policies that uphold this system may
occasionally be held to account. Even the policies
themselves may occasionably be held up to scrutiny.
But the assumptions behind them are rarely
questioned – certainly not in what we are educated
to call the “mainstream”.
That is an amazing outcome given that almost none
of us benefit from the system we effectively
sanction every time we turn out to vote in an
election. Very few of us are rulers, or enjoy
enormous wealth, or live on large estates, or own
companies that deprive thousands of the fruit of
their labours, or profit from destroying life on
Earth. And yet the ideology that rationalises all
that injustice, inequality and immorality not only
stays in place but actually engenders more
injustice, more inequality, more immorality year by
year.
We watch this all unfold passively, largely
indifferently because we believe – we are made
to believe – we are powerless.
Regenerating like Dr Who
By now, you may be frustrated that power still
lacks a name. Is it not late-stage capitalism? Or
maybe neoliberalism? Globalisation? Or
neoconservatism? Yes, we can identify it right now
as ideologically embedded in all of those
necessarily vague terms. But we should remember that
it is something deeper still.
Power always has an ideological shape and physical
structures. It has both faces. It existed before
capitalism, and will exist after it (if capitalism
doesn’t kill us first). Human history has consisted
of power consolidating and regenerating itself in
new form over and over again – like the eponymous
hero of the long-running British TV sci-fi series
Doctor Who – as different groups have learnt how to
harness it, usurp it and put it to self-interested
use. Power has been integral to human societies. Now
our survival as individuals and as a species depends
on our finding a way to reinvent power, to tame it
and share it equally between us all – and thereby
dissolve it. It is the ultimate challenge.
By its very nature, power must prevent this step
– a step that, given our current predicament, is
necessary to prevent planetary-wide death. Power can
only perpetuate itself by deceiving us about what it
has done and will do, and what alternatives there
might be. Power tells us stories that it is not
power – that it is the rule of law, justice, ethics,
protection from anarchy or the natural world,
inevitable. And to obscure the fact that these are
just stories – and that like all stories, these ones
may not actually be true, or may even be the
opposite of truth – it embeds these stories in
ideology.
We are encouraged to believe that the media – in
the widest sense possible – has authority alone to
tell us these stories, to promote them as orthodoxy.
It is the lens through which the world is revealed
to us. Reality filtered through the lens of power.
The media is not just newspapers and TV news
broadcasts. Power also exerts its hold on our
imaginative horizons through all forms of “popular”
entertainment, from Hollywood films and Youtube
videos to social media and video games.
In the US, for example, almost all media is owned
by a handful of corporations that have diverse
interests related to power. Power expresses itself
in our modern societies as wealth and ownership. And
corporations stand at the apex of that structure of
power. They and their chief functionaries (for
corporate executives do not really control power, it
controls them) own almost all of the planet’s
resources, they hold almost all of the wealth. They
typically use their money to buy attention for
themselves and their brands while at the same time
buying invisibility for deep power.
To take one example: Rupert Murdoch’s power is
visible to us, as are his negative personal
qualities and occasionally the pernicious influence
of his newspapers. But it is not just that his
newspapers play a part in shaping and controlling
what we talk about on any given day, for good or
bad. They also control all the time what we
are capable of thinking and not thinking. That is
true power. And that role will never be
mentioned by a Murdoch organisation – or any of his
supposed rivals in the corporate media. It is the
preserve of blogs like this one for very obvious
reasons.
That makes media corporations a key pillar of the
matrix of power. Their journalists are servants of
corporate power, whether they know it or not.
Mostly, of course, they do not.
The veiling of power
These thoughts were provoked by a rare comment
from a prominent corporate journalist about power.
Jonathan Freedland is a senior columnist at the
supposedly liberal Guardian, and a British
equivalent of Thomas Friedman or Jeffrey Goldberg.
His job is to help make deep power invisible, even
as he criticises the powerful. Freedland’s
stock-in-trade is using the ephemeral dramas of
political power to veil true power.
It was therefore intriguing to see Freedland
actually try to define “power” in a recent column
intended to dissuade people from backing Bernie
Sanders as the Democratic nominee. Here is what he
writes in reference to power:
If recent events have reminded us of
anything, it’s that in politics, power is the
whole ballgame. …
Most significant of all, a [political] party
in power has the ability to create the
conditions that ensure it keeps it. …
It’s understanding the power of power, a
truth so obvious that it should barely need
stating, that is driving some battle-hardened
veterans of past left campaigns to despair.
“Nothing. Without power, there is nothing,”
fumed James Carville, who ran the last
successful Democratic effort to oust a sitting
Republican president when he masterminded Bill
Clinton’s victory back in 1992.
But the first step is to accept its
importance, to recognise that winning power is
the sine qua non of politics, literally the
thing without which there is nothing.
Notice that from the outset Freedland limits his
definition of power in ways that are designed to
assist power rather examine or scrutinise it. He
states something meaningful – the importance of
“understanding the power of power, a truth so
obvious that it should barely need stating” – but
then resolutely obscures the “power of power”.
What Freedland addresses instead is a lesser form
of power – power as visible political drama, the
illusion that we, those who currently have no real
power, can exercise power by voting for candidates
already selected for their ideological subservience
to power, in a political and economic system
structured to serve power, in a media and cultural
landscape where those who try to address or
challenge real power either end up being dismissed
as “conspiracy theorists”, or “tinfoil hat-wearing”
leftists, or crazed socialists; or end up being
locked away as subversives, as dangers to society,
as has prominently happened to Chelsea Manning and
Julian Assange.
A small hint that Freedland is veiling power –
from himself too – is his unthinking reference to
Bill Clinton’s electoral adviser as running a “left
campaign”. Of course, stripped of a narrative that
serves power, neither Clinton nor his campaign could
ever have been described as of the left.
While Freedland frets about how political power
has moved to the right in the US and UK, he also
indulges the deceptive consolation that cultural
power – “the media, the Academy, entertainment”, as
he refers to it – can act as a liberal-left
counterweight, even if an ineffective one, to the
right’s political power. But as I pointed out, the
media and entertainment world – of which Freedland
is very much part – are there precisely to uphold
power, rationalise it, propagandise for it, and
refine it so as to better conceal it. They are
integral to the shadow play, to the veiling of real
power. The left-right dichotomy – within the
severely circumscribed limits he and his colleagues
impose – is part of that veiling process.
Freedland’s seeming analysis of power does not,
of course, lead him to consider in any meaningful
way the most pressing and vital issues of the
moment, issues that are deeply entwined with what
power is and how it functions:
- how we might upend economic “orthodoxy” to
prevent the imminent collapse of a global
financial system fallaciously premised on the
idea of infinite growth on a finite planet,
- and how, if we are to survive as a species,
we might deal with a corporate power that is
polluting the planet to death through the
aggressive cultivation of rampant, profit-driven
consumerism.
These issues are only ever addressed tangentially
in the corporate media, in ways that do not threaten
deep power.
Glitches in the system
The kind of power Freedland focuses on is not
real power. He is interested only in taking “power”
away from Donald Trump to give it to a supposedly
“electable” candidate for the Democratic party, like
Pete Buttigieg or Michael Bloomberg, rather than a
supposedly “unelectable” Sanders; or to take “power”
from Boris Johnson through a “moderate”, pliable
Labour party reminiscent of the Tony Blair era
rather than the “alienating” democratic socialism he
and his colleagues worked so relentlessly to
undermine from the moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected
Labour leader.
In other words, for Freedland and the entire
spectrum of the corporate media, the only discussion
they care to have is about who might best serve a
superficial, ephemeral political power – without
actually defining or even alluding to real power.
There is good reason for this. Because if we
understood what power is, that it depends on ideas
that we have been force-fed our every waking moment,
ideas that enslave our minds and are now poised to
kill us, we might decide that the whole system of
power, not just its latest pretty or ugly face,
needs to be swept away. That we need to start with
entirely new ideas and values. And that the only way
to liberate ourselves from our current pathological,
self-destructive ideas is to stop listening to the
loyal functionaries of power like Jonathan
Freedland.
The current efforts to stop Sanders from winning
the Democratic nomination do at least help to open
our eyes.
The Democratic party is one of the two national
US parties whose role, like the corporate media, is
to conceal deep power. Its function is to create the
illusion of choice, and thereby keep the viewing
public engrossed in the drama of politics. That does
not mean that there are no differences between the
Republican and Democratic parties. There are, and
for some people they are meaningful and can be
vitally important. But those differences are
completely trivial from the perspective of power.
In fact, power’s goal is to magnify those trivial
differences to make them look like major
differences. But whichever party gets into “power”,
the corporations will keep despoiling and destroying
the planet, they will continue driving us into
profit-making wars, and they will carry on
accumulating vast wealth largely unregulated. They
will be able to do so because the Republican and
Democratic party’s leaderships rose to their current
positions – they were selected – by proving their
usefulness to deep power. That is the power of
power, after all.
That is not to say there are never glitches in
the system. Mistakes happen, though they are usually
corrected quickly. The system is not
all-powerful – not yet, at least. Our situation
is not necessarily hopeless, though the struggle is
immensely difficult because most of us have not yet
worked out what power is and therefore have no idea
how it might be confronted.
Power has had to make historic compromises, to
take defensive actions in the hope of maintaining
its invisibility. In the west, it eventually
conceded the vote to all adult men, then women, to
ensure its legitimacy. As a result, power shifted
from expressing itself through overt threats of
physical violence to maintain order and moved
towards manufacturing an ideological consensus – our
current passivity to our imminent self-destruction –
through education systems and the corporate media.
(The threat of violence is only veiled, and can
be made explicit against those who doubt the
legitimacy of power or try to stop its descent into
self-destruction, as Extinction Rebellion will
increasingly find the more it pushes for deep and
systemic change.)
Power’s relentless drive to feed the insatiable
appetite it has created for us as consumers, and its
obsession with technological fixes as a way to
maximise efficiency and profits, sometimes create
these glitches. They open up new possibilities for
exposing power. One recent example is the
information publishing revolution embodied by social
media. Power is now desperately trying to stuff that
genie back into the lamp with self-serving
narratives about “fake news” on the left (made more
credible by conflating it with power-serving fake
news on the right), as well as making drastic
changes to algorithms to disappear the left’s
rapidly emerging counter-narratives.
And most importantly, power is struggling to
maintain the illusion of its benign nature, of
normal service, in the face of real-world facts,
such as the planet heating up, runaway fires in
Australia, balmy winter temperatures in the
Antarctic, the mass die-off of insects, and the tide
of plastic choking the oceans. Its efforts to
exploit the wealth-generating opportunities offered
by the climate and wider environmental emergencies,
while refusing to acknowledge that it is
entirely responsible for those emergencies, may
yet backfire. The question is not whether we wake up
to the role of power, but whether we do so before it
is too late to effect change.
The Sanders threat
Sanders is one of those glitches. Just like
Jeremy Corbyn was in the UK. They have been thrown
up by current circumstances. They are the first
signs of a tentative political awakening to power,
sometimes dismissed generically as “populism”. They
are the inevitable outcome of the ever greater
difficulty power faces in concealing its
self-destructiveness as it seeks to remove every
last limit to its voracious acquisitiveness.
Once upon a time, those who paid the price of
power were out of view, in disenfranchised, urban
slums or far-off lands. But the accelerating
contradictions of power – of late-stage, global
capitalism, if you prefer a specific name – have
brought those effects much closer to home, where
they cannot so easily be ignored or discounted.
Growing sections of western societies, the central
locus of power, understand that there needs to be
serious, not cosmetic, change.
Power needs to be rid of Sanders, just
as it previously had to rid itself of Corbyn because
both are that rarest thing – politicians who are not
imprisoned within the current power paradigm.
Because they do not serve power cultishly like most
of their colleagues, such politicians threaten to
shine a light on true power. Ultimately, power will
use any tool to destroy them. But power prefers, if
possible, to maintain its cloak of invisibility, to
avoid exposing the sham of the consumption-driven
“democracy” it engineered to consolidate and expand
its power. It prefers our collusion.
The reason the Democratic party establishment is
trying to bring down Sanders at the primaries stage
and crown a power-functionary like Buttigieg, Biden
or even Elizabeth Warren – or if it must, parachute
in a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg – is not
because Sanders would on his own be able to end the
globe-spanning power of pathological capitalism and
consumerism. It is because the nearer he gets to the
main shadow play, to the presidency, the more power
will have to make itself visible to defeat him.
(Language makes it difficult to describe this
dynamic without resorting to metaphors that make
power sound fancifully human rather than structural
and ideological.)
As the other candidates increasingly look
unsuited to the task of toppling Sanders for the
nomination, and rigging the primaries has proved
much harder to do covertly than hoped, power has had
to flex its muscles more publicly than it likes. So
narrative is being marshalled to destroy Sanders in
the same way that the antisemitism and Brexit
narratives were used to halt Corbyn’s grassroots
movement in its tracks. In Sanders’ case, the
corporate media is preparing a readymade Russia
narrative against Sanders as he gets nearer to power
– a narrative that has already been refined for use
against Trump.
(Trump’s relation to power could be the basis for
an entirely separate post. He is not an ideological
threat to power, he is one if its functionaries. But
he is a potential Harvey Weinstein or Prince Andrew.
He can be sacrificed if needs be. The Russiagate
narrative has served two purposes useful to power.
It has tamed Trump’s ego-based politics to ensure he
does not threaten deep power by making it more
visible. And it has created a compelling political drama that
channels and dissipates the “resistance” to Trump,
satisfying much of the left’s own needs to feel they
are doing something, when in fact they are
simply strengthening Trump and deep power.)
Caught in a trap
Late last week, as Nevada’s landslide for Sanders
was imminent, the western media
reported claims, based on unnamed “US
officials”, that the Vermont senator is seen by the
Russians as an “asset”, and that they are trying to
help either him or Trump get elected. No one making
that claim was identified, no explanation of how
Sanders could be an asset was offered, nor
was evidence cited for how the Russians might be
able to help Sanders. Power doesn’t need facts or
evidence, even when its claims are self-evidently
disruptive to the democratic process. It exists
chiefly in the realm of narrative and ideology. This
is a story, just like Corbyn’s “antisemitism
crisis”, that is made true simply through
repetition.
Because power is power, its narratives can defy
the most elementary rules of logic. After all, how
could an unverified, evidence-free narrative
about Russian interference on behalf of Sanders’
campaign be more important than actual
interference intended to damage Sanders’
campaign by anonymous “US officials”? How could such
undemocratic, unaccountable efforts to interfere in
the outcome of the US election be so readily peddled
by the media unless the entire press corps is
incapable or unwilling to engage their critical
faculties in favour of the democratic principles
they claim to uphold? Unless, in fact, they are not
there representing us, the people, and our
interests, but are really servants of what amounts
to a power-cult.
As I have documented many times before, Corbyn
found himself caught in a trap of the kind now faced
by Sanders. Any supporter (including Jews) who
denied that the Labour party Corbyn led was
antisemitic, or argued that the antisemitism claims
were being weaponised to damage him, was cited as
proof that Corbyn had indeed attracted antisemites
to the party. It was antisemitic to conclude, based
on the evidence, that Corbyn’s Labour party was
not antisemitic. But as soon as Corbyn
reluctantly agreed under media and party pressure to
accept the alternative – that an antisemitism
problem had taken root under his watch – he was
implicitly forced to concede that there was
something about him and his values that allowed
antisemitism to take root. He was damned either way
– which was precisely how power makes sure it
emerges victorious.
Unless we can develop our critical faculties to
resist its propaganda, power holds all the cards and
so it can deal them the way that best suits its
interests. The Russia narrative can be similarly
written and rewritten in any way needed to damage
Sanders. If he dissociates himself from the Russia
narrative, it can be cited as proof that he is in
the Kremlin’s pocket. But if Sanders supports the
claims of Trump’s collusion with Russia, as he has
done, he simply confirms the narrative that Vladimir
Putin is interfering in the election – which can
then be twisted when necessary to present Sanders as
one of Russia’s assets.
The message is: A vote for Trump or Sanders will
put Putin in change of the White House. If you’re a
patriot, better to choose a safe pair of hands –
those of Buttgeig, Biden or
Bloomberg. (Paradoxically, one of the glitches might
be a US presidential election campaign between two
billionaires, a “choice” between Trump and
Bloomberg. Should power become too
successful in engineering the electoral system to
serve its interests alone, too successful in
allowing money to buy all political
influence, it risks making itself visible to a wider
section of the public than ever before.)
None of this should be seen as sinister or
conspiratorial, though of course it sounds that way
to those who fail or refuse to understand power. It
is in the logic of power to exercise and consolidate
its power to the greatest extent possible. And power
has been accumulating power to itself over
centuries, over millennia. Our failure to understand
this simple truth is really a form of political
illiteracy, one that has been engendered by our
submission to, our worship of, power.
Those caught up in the drama of politics, the
surface ripples – almost all of us, almost all of
the time – are actors in, rather than witnesses to,
the story of power. And for that reason we can see
only other actors, the battles between the the
powerful and the powerless, and between the
powerless and the powerless, rather than power
itself.
We watch the drama without seeing the theatre in
which that drama is unfolding. In fact, power is
much more than the drama or the theatre. It is the
unseen foundations on which the theatre is built. To
employ another metaphor, we are like soldiers on the
battlefields of old. We slaughter – or are
slaughtered by – people no different to us, defined
as an enemy, cheered on by generals, politicians and
journalists in the service of a supposed ideal we
cannot articulate beyond the emptiest slogans.
Power is the structure of the thoughts we think
we control, a framework for the ideologies we think
we voted for, the values we think we choose to
treasure, the horizon of imaginations we think we
created. Power exists only so long as we consent to
it through our blind obedience. But in truth, it the
weakest of opponents – it can be overcome simply by
raising our heads and opening our eyes.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based journalist and
winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. No one pays him to write these
blog posts. If you appreciated it, please consider
visiting his website and make a donation to support
his work.
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