By Chris Hedges
This is a talk Chris Hedges
gave on April 4th at the Independent National
Convention in Austin, Texas.
April 07, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- We are undergoing the
most vicious class war in U.S. history. Social
inequality has reached its
most extreme levels of disparity in
over 200 years, surpassing the
rapacious greed of the era of the robber barons.
The legislative, executive and judicial branches
of government, along with the media and
universities, have been seized by a tiny
cabal of billionaires and corporations who
pass laws and legislation that consolidate their
power and obscene wealth at our expense. We are
sacrificial victims, whether on the left or the
right, helpless before this modern incarnation
of the Biblical idol Moloch.
In 1928, the top one percent held about
24 percent of the nation’s income, a percentage
that steadily declined until 1973. By the early
1970s the oligarchy’s assault against workers
was accelerated in response to the rise of
popular mass movements in the 1960s. The
billionaire class and corporations poured
billions into political parties, academia,
think-tanks and the media. Critics of capitalism
had difficulty finding a platform, including on
public broadcasting. Those who sang to the tune
the billionaires played were lavished with
grants, book deals, tenured professorships,
awards and permanent megaphones in the
commercial press. Wages stagnated. Income
inequality grew to
monstrous proportions. Tax rates for
corporations and the rich were slashed until
it culminated in a virtual tax boycott.
Today, the top 10 percent of the richest
people in the United States own almost
70 percent of the country’s total wealth. The
top 1 percent control 32
percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of
the U.S. population hold 3
percent of all U.S. wealth.
These ruling oligarchs have us, not to
mention the natural world, in a death grip. They
have mobilized the organs of state security,
militarized the police, built the largest prison
system in the world and deformed the courts to
criminalize poverty. We are the most spied upon,
watched, photographed and monitored population
in human history, and I covered the Stasi state
in East Germany. When the corporate state
watches you 24-hours a day you cannot use the
word liberty. This is the relationship between a
master and a slave.
The oligarchs have bought off intellectuals
and artists to serve commercial interests. The
machinery of corporate dominance is carried out
by the college-educated, those who rise to the
top of academia — such as the economist Larry
Summers who pushed the
deregulation of Wall Street under Bill Clinton,
or the political scientist Samuel Huntington
who warned that
countries like the U.S. and U.K. were suffering
from an “excess of democracy” — those who manage
the financial firms and corporate
superstructures, those who provide the jingles,
advertising, brands and political propaganda in
public relations firms, those in the press who
work as stenographers to power and those in the
entertainment industry who fill our heads with
fantasies.
It is one of the great ironies that the
corporate state needs the abilities of the
educated, intellectuals and artists to maintain
power, yet the moment any begin to think
independently they are silenced. The relentless
assault on culture, journalism, education, the
arts and critical thinking, has left those who
speak in the language of class warfare
marginalized, frantic Cassandras who are viewed
as slightly unhinged and depressingly
apocalyptic. Those with the courage to shine a
light into the inner workings of the machinery,
such as Noam Chomsky, are turned into pariahs,
or, like Julian Assange, relentlessly
persecuted.
Culture is vital to democracy. It is radical
and transformative. It expresses what lies deep
within us. It gives words to our reality. It
validates the facts of our lives. It makes us
feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize
with those who are different or oppressed. It
reveals what is happening around us. It honors
mystery.
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to
illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through
the vast forest,” James Baldwin writes, “so that
we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its
purpose, which is, after all, to make the world
a more human dwelling place.”
“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary
function as they function, and pay whatever dues
they must pay behind it because they are both
possessed by a vision, and they do not so much
follow this vision as find themselves driven by
it,” writes Baldwin.
The central premise of mass culture is that
capitalism unassailable engine of human
progress, even as global capitalists have
pumped nearly 37
percent more greenhouse gas emissions into the
atmosphere since the first Convention on Climate
Change in 1992. Speak of values and needs, speak
of moral systems and meaning, defy the primacy
of profit, especially if you only have the few
minutes allotted to you on a cable television
show to communicate back-and-forth in the usual
thought-terminating cliches, and it sounds like
gibberish to a conditioned public .
Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a
revolutionary force. It is endemically unstable.
It exploits human beings and the natural world
until exhaustion or collapse. That is its
nature. But those in society tasked with
revealing this nature have been bought off or
silenced. Truth is not derived from social
values or ethics external to corporate culture.
Our social, familial and individual rights and
needs, as well as our ability to focus on these
rights and needs, are robbed from us.
There are their facts and there are our facts.
Markets, economic growth, higher corporate
profits and consolidations, austerity,
technological innovation, deindustrialization
and a climbing stock market are their facts.
Janet Yellen’s need to orchestrate
unemployment to bring down inflation is, for
them, a vital fact.
Our facts, the facts of those who
are evicted, go to prison, are unemployed, are
sick yet uninsured, the 12 million children who
go to bed hungry, or live, like nearly 600,000
Americans, on the streets, are not part of the
equation. Our facts do not attract
advertisers. Our facts do not fit with
the Disneyfied world the media and advertisers
are paid to create. Our facts are an impediment
to increased profits.
One strives towards a dream. One lives within
an illusion. And the illusion that we are fed is
that there is never an impediment which can’t be
overcome. That if we just dig deep enough within
ourselves, if we find our inner strength, if we
grasp, as self-help gurus tell us, that we are
truly exceptional, if we believe that Jesus can
perform miracles, if we focus on happiness, we
can have everything we desire. And when we fail,
as most fail in a post-industrial United States
to fulfill this illusion, we are told we didn’t
try hard enough.
Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along
with individuals, are driven by two primary
instincts. One is the instinct for life — Eros,
the quest to love, nurture, protect, and
preserve. The second is the death instinct. The
death instinct, called Thanatos by
post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and
violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living
things, including ourselves. One of these two
forces, Freud writes, is always ascendant.
Societies in decline are seduced by the death
instinct, as Freud observes in “Civilization and
Its Discontents,” written during the rise of
European fascism and World War II. The death
instinct sees destruction as creation. The
satisfaction of the death instinct, Freud
writes, “is accompanied by an extraordinarily
high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to
its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the
latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”
A population beset by despair, a sense of
dethronement and powerlessness, is intoxicated
by an orgy of annihilation, which soon morphs
into self-annihilation. It has no interest in
nurturing a world that has betrayed them. It
seeks to eradicate this world and replace it
with a mythical one. It retreats into
self-adulation fed by self-delusion and
historical amnesia.
The danger of illusion is that it allows you
to remain in a state of infantilism. As the gap
opens between the illusion of who we think we
are, and the reality of the inequality, the
violence, the foreclosures, the bankruptcies
that are caused by the inability to pay medical
bills, and ultimately the collapse of empire, we
are unprepared emotionally, psychologically, and
intellectually for what confronts us. When the
wolf is at the door, when our house is
foreclosed, when unemployment insurance runs
out, we react as a child reacts. We search for a
demagogue or a savior who promises protection,
moral renewal, vengeance and new glory.
This is the deformed world our corporate
masters have created. It is one we must confront
and dismantle. It requires us to pit power
against power. It requires us to dismantle the
illusions used to disempower us, to adhere to
values based on the sanctity of life, rather
than the fact of profit. It requires us to cross
the cultural and political divides the ruling
class has erected and to build new political and
social coalitions.
The politics of diversity have become
advertising gimmicks, brands. Barack Obama did
nothing to blunt social inequality and imperial
folly. Identity politics and diversity busy
liberals and the educated with a boutique
activism at the expense of addressing systemic
injustices or the scourge of permanent war. The haves scold
the have-nots for their bad manners,
racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness,
while ignoring the root causes of their economic
distress or the suicidal despair gripping much
of the country.
Did the lives of Native Americans improve
because of the legislation mandating
assimilation and the revoking of tribal land
titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the
first Native American Vice President? Are we
better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes
affirmative action, on the Supreme Court? Or
Victoria Nuland, a war hawk, in the State
Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war
more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an
African-American, is the Secretary of Defense?
Is the military more humane because it accepts
transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and
the surveillance state that controls it,
ameliorated because Sundar Pichai, who was born
in India, is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has
the weapons industry improved because Kathy J.
Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman?
And another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO
of General Dynamics? Are working families better
off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing
unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower
inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the
movie industry enhanced when a female director,
Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,”
agitprop for the CIA?
Richard Rorty in his last book “Achieving Our
Country” saw where we are headed. He writes:
[M]embers of labor unions, and
unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner
or later realize that their government is
not even trying to prevent wages from
sinking or to prevent jobs from being
exported. Around the same time, they will
realize that suburban white-collar workers —
themselves desperately afraid of being
downsized — are not going to let themselves
be taxed to provide social benefits for
anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The
nonsuburban electorate will decide that the
system has failed and start looking around
for a strongman to vote for — someone
willing to assure them that, once he is
elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky
lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and
postmodernist professors will no longer be
calling the shots. A scenario like that of
Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen
Here may then be played out. For once a
strongman takes office, nobody can predict
what will happen. In 1932, most of the
predictions made about what would happen if
Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were
wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen
is that the gains made in the past forty
years by black and brown Americans, and by
homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular
contempt for women will come back into
fashion. The words [slur for an
African-American that begins with “n”] and
[slur for a Jewish person that begins with
“k”] will once again be heard in the
workplace. All the sadism which the academic
Left has tried to make unacceptable to its
students will come flooding back. All the
resentment which badly educated Americans
feel about having their manners dictated to
them by college graduates will find an
outlet.
The public has been siloed into antagonistic
tribes. Catering to these antagonistic tribes is
the business model of the media, whether Fox
News or MSNBC. Not only are these competing
demographics fed what they want to hear, but the
opposing tribe is demonized, with the scalding
rhetoric widening the chasms within the public.
This delights the oligarchs.
If we are to wrest power back from
corporations and the billionaire class who have
carried out this coup d’état in slow motion, as
well as prevent the rise of neofascism, we must
build a left-right coalition free from the moral
absolutism of woke zealots. We must organize to
use the one weapon workers possess that can
cripple and destroy the billionaire class’s
economic and political power. The strike.
The oligarchs have spent decades abolishing
or domesticating unions, turning the few unions
that remain, into obsequious junior partners in
the capitalist system. Only 10.1 percent of the
workforce is unionized.
As of January 2022, private-sector unionization
stood at its lowest point since the passage of
the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And
yet, 71 percent of U.S. workers say they would
like to belong to a union, the highest in nearly
six decades, and up from 48 percent in 2009,
according to a Gallup poll conducted last
summer.
A series of anti-labor laws, including the
1947 Taft-Hartley
Act and so called Right-to-Work laws,
which outlaw union
shops, were crafted to weaken workers bargaining
power and stymie the ability to strike. When the
Taft-Hartley Act was passed,
about a third of the workforce was unionized, peaking in
1954 at 34.8 percent. The Act is a frontal
assault on unions. It prohibits jurisdictional
strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or
political strikes, and secondary boycotts,
whereby unions strike against employers who
continue to do business with a firm that is
undergoing a strike. It forbids secondary or common
situs picketing and closed shops.
Companies are permitted under the Act to
require employees to attend anti-union
propaganda meetings, which Amazon does with its
workers. The Federal government is empowered to
obtain strikebreaking injunctions and impose a
deal on workers if an impending or current
strike imperils “national health or safety,” as
the Biden administration did with the freight
railway workers. The right to strike in the U.S.
barely exists.
The strike is the only weapon workers have to
hold power in check. Third parties can run
candidates to challenge the duopoly, but they
are useless appendages unless they have the
power of organized labor behind them. As history
has repeatedly proven, organized labor, allied
with a political party dedicated to its
interests, is the only way we can protect
ourselves from the oligarchs.
Nick French, in an article in Jacobin, draws
on the work of the sociologist Walter Korpi,
who examined the rise of the Swedish welfare
state in his book “The
Democratic Class Struggle”. Korpi detailed
how Swedish workers, “built a strong and
well-organized trade union movement, organized
along industrial lines and united by a central
trade union federation…which worked closely with
the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden
(SAP).” The battle to build the welfare state
required organizing — 76 percent of workers were
unionized — waves of strikes, militant labor
activity and political pressure from the SAP.
“Measured in terms of the number of working
days per worker,” Korpi writes, “from the turn
of the century up to the early 1930s, Sweden had
the highest level of strikes and lockouts among
the Western nations.” From 1900 to 1913, “there
were 1,286 days of idleness due to strikes and
lockouts per thousand workers in Sweden. From
1919–38, there were 1,448. By comparison, in the
United States last year, according to National
Bureau of Economic Research data, there were
fewer than 3.7 days
of idleness per
thousand workers due to work stoppages.”
At what point does a beleaguered population
living near or below the poverty line rise up in
protest? At what point will it engage in
sustained civil resistance to break the
stranglehold of the power elite? At what point
will people be willing to accept the risk of
arrest, prison or worse?
This, if history is any guide, is unknown.
But that the tinder is there is now undeniable,
even to the ruling class. As the American
philosopher Richard Rorty warned, if we allow
these divisions to expand, we run the risk of
allowing Christian fascists to snuff out what is
left of our anemic republic. But if we organize
around common concerns, including the death
sentence handed to billions of the global
population by the fossil fuel industry, we can
divert focus from the demonized other to the
real enemy — our corporate masters.
France is giving us a powerful lesson in how
to pit popular power against a ruling elite. The
attempt by French President Emmanuel Macron to
unilaterally raise the age for retirement has triggered massive
strikes and protests across France, including in
Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux. Some 3.5
million workers were out in France last week
during their ninth rolling strike. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to gut
judicial oversight was put on hold when the
country’s largest trade union umbrella group organized strikes
shutting down transportation, universities,
restaurants and retailers. Our own history of
militant labor activity, especially in the
1930s, resulted in a series of measures that
protected working men and women across the U.S.,
including Social Security, the eight hour work
day and the end to child labor.
The United States had the bloodiest labor
wars of any industrialized nation — rivaled only
by the eradication of organized labor by fascist
regimes in Europe. Hundreds of U.S. workers were
killed. Thousands were wounded. Tens of
thousands were blacklisted. Radical union
organizers such
as Joe Hill were executed on trumped-up
murder charges, imprisoned like
Eugene V. Debs, or driven, like “Big Bill”
Haywood, into exile. Militant unions were
outlawed. During the Palmer Raids carried out on
the second anniversary of the Russian
Revolution, on Nov. 17, 1919, more than 10,000
alleged communists, socialists and anarchists
were arrested. Many were held for long periods
without trial. Thousands of foreign-born emigrés,
such as Emma
Goldman, Alexander
Berkman and Mollie
Steimer were arrested,
imprisoned and ultimately deported.
Socialist publications, such as Appeal
to Reason and The
Masses, were shut down.
The Great Railway Strike of 1922 saw company
gun thugs open fire, killing strikers.
Pennsylvania Railroad President, Samuel Rea,
alone hired over
16,000 gunmen to break the strike of nearly
20,000 employees at the company’s shops in
Altoona, Pennsylvania, the largest in the world.
The railroads mounted a massive press campaign
to demonize the strikers. They hired thousands
of scabs, many of whom were African-American
workers who were barred by union management from
membership. The Supreme Court upheld “yellow
dog” contracts that forbade workers from
unionizing. The establishment press, along with
the Democratic Party, were full partners in the
demonization and defanging of labor. The same
year also saw unprecedented railway strikes in Germany and India.
To prevent railroad strikes, which disrupted
nationwide commerce in 1877, 1894 and 1922 the
federal government passed The
Railway Labor Act in 1926 — union members call
it “The Railway Anti-Labor Act” — setting out
numerous requirements, including the appointment
of a Presidential Emergency Board before a
strike could be called. Biden set
up a Presidential Emergency Board in July of
last year. One month later, freight railway
workers were forced to accept a contract that
excluded any paid sick leave.
Our oligarchs are as vicious and tight-fisted
as those of the past. They will fight with
everything at their disposal to crush the
aspirations of workers and the demand for
democratic reforms. It will not be a quick or an
easy battle. But if we focus on the oppressor,
rather than demonizing those who are also
oppressed, if we do the hard work of building
mass movements to keep the powerful in check, if
we accept that civil disobedience has a cost,
including jail time, if we are willing to use
the most powerful weapon we have – the strike –
we can reclaim our country.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as
a foreign correspondent in Central America, the
Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a
foreign correspondent for 15 years.
https://chrishedges.substack.com
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