This Country Needs a Few Good Communists
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/
Posted on May 31, 2010
By Chris Hedges
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.