Rekindling the Radical Imagination
The following article is transcribed from a video of Noam Chomky’s closing speech at the Left Forum, March 2010. The conditions that inspired the title: “The Center Cannot Hold, Rekindling the Radical Imagination,” are described as “an ongoing capitalist crisis which generated high hopes that the parties and social movements of the Left, would be re-energized. So far this has not happened. Meanwhile the Right seems to have emerged as a more strident force. The result is that insecurity grows. In the U.S., the Obama administration negotiates from the center, and concedes more and more to business interests and political conservatives. Can the opportunities generated by the capitalist crisis rekindle the radical imagination?”
Five years later are the conditions that Chomsky describes in his 2010 talk changed enough and given us the crucial lessons that will result in the hoped for and necessary rekindling of the radical imagination?
Joe Stack
On February 18, 2010, Joseph Andrews Stack crashed his small plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide. He left a manifesto explaining his actions. It was mostly ridiculed, but I think it deserves a lot better than that. Stack’s manifesto traces the life history that led him to this final desperate act. The story begins when he was a teenage student, living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania near the heart of what was once a great industrial area. His neighbor was a woman in her 80s surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills in central Pennsylvania with the promise from big business and the union that for the 30 years of his service he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because incompetent mill management and corrupt unions—not to mention the government—raided the pension fund and stole the retirement.
All his neighbor had was social security to live on—and Stack could have added that there had been concerted efforts by the super rich and their political allies to take even that away, on spurious grounds. Stack decided then that he couldn’t trust Big Business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he couldn’t trust the government that cared nothing about people like him, but cared only about the rich and privileged; and he couldn’t trust the legal system in which there are two interpretations (his words) for every law—one for the rich and one for the rest of us. And the government leaves us with the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies that are murdering tens of thousands of people a year with care rationed by wealth all in a social order in which a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, thefull force of the federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days, if not hours.
Willing to Die For Their Freedom?
Stack tells us that his desperate final act was an effort to join those who are willing to die for their freedom in the hope of awakening others from their torpor. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had in mind his neighbor eating cat food who taught him about the real world when he was a teenager and about her husbands premature death. Her husband didn’t literally commit suicide after having been discarded to the trash heap, but it’s far from an isolated case which we can add to the colossal toll of institutional crimes of state capitalism.
There are poignant studies of the indignation and rage of those who have been cast aside as these state corporate programs of financialization and deindustrialization have closed plants and destroyed families and communities. These studies reveal the sense of acute betrayal on the part of working people who believed that they had fulfilled their duty to society in what they regarded as a moral compact with business and government, only to discern that they had been instruments for profit and power—truisms from which they had been carefully shielded by doctrinal institutions.
Similarities
There are striking similarities with China, the world’s second largest economy. This has been investigated in a penetrating study of Chinese labor which draws a comparison between working class outrage and desperation in the decaying industrial sectors of the U.S. and the fury among workers in what is called China’s rust belt—the state socialist industrial center in the northeast, since abandoned by the state in favor of state capitalist development of the Southeast sunbelt.
In both regions the study finds massive protests. In the rust belt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their counterparts in the U.S. According to official statistics, there were 58,000 incidents of mass protest in 2003 in just one province of the rustbelt with 3 million people participating. Some 40 million workers who were dropped from work units were plagued by a profound sense of insecurity arousing rage and desperation.
Something similar can be found in rural India. Their food consumption has sharply declined for the great majority since the neo-liberal reforms were implemented—all of this amidst accolades for India’s fabulous growth. And indeed it was fabulous—for some, though not for the rural areas where peasant suicides increased at about the same rate as the number of billionaires living not far away.
And, in fact, not so attractive for the American workers who were transferred to India to reduce IBM’s labor costs. IBM eventually had three-fourths of it’s workforce abroad. Business Week called IBM the quintessential American Company which is quite appropriate. It became the global giant in computing thanks to the unwitting munificence of U.S. taxpayers who also substantially funded the whole IT revolution on which IBM relies, along with most of the rest of the high tech economy.
There is much excited talk these days about the great global shift of power with speculation about whether China might displace the U.S. as the dominant global power, along with India, which, if it happened, would mean that the global system would be returning to something like what it was before the European conquests. And indeed, their GDP growth has been spectacular.
But there’s a lot more to say about it, so if you take a look at the UN Human Development Index—the basic measure of the health of a society—it turns out that India retains its place near the bottom. It’s 134th, slightly above Cambodia, below Laos. China is ranked 92nd, a bit above Jordan, below the Dominican Republic and Iran. By comparison, Cuba, which has been under harsh U.S. attack for 50 years, is ranked 52nd, the highest in Central America and the Caribbean, and barely below the richest societies in South America. India and China suffer from extremely high inequality so that well over a billion of their inhabitans fall far lower in the scale. Furthermore, an accurate accounting would go beyond conventional measures to include serious costs that China and India can’t ignore for long-—ecological resource depletion and many others.
Adam Smith’s Truism
These common speculations about a global shift of power disregard a crucial factor that’s familiar to all of us—nations divorced from the internal distribution of power are not the real actors in international affairs. That truism was brought to the public attention by that incorrigible radical Adam Smith who recognized that the principle architects of power in England were the owners of society—in his day the merchants and manufacturers—and they made sure that policy would attend to their interests, however grievous the impact on the people of England.
Then, of course, much worse is what he called the victims of what he called the savage injustices of Europe and abroad. British crimes in India were the main concern of an old fashioned conservative like Smith and his apparent moral values. To his modern worshippers, Smith’s truisms were ridiculed as elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist imperialist networks.
Bearing Smith’s radical truisms in mind, we see that there is indeed a global shift of power, though not the one that occupies center stage. It’s a shift from the global workforce to transnational capital and it’s been sharply escalating during the neo-liberal years and the cost has been substantial—including the Joe Stacks of the U.S., the starving peasants in India, the millions of protesting workers in China where the labor share in income is declining even more rapidly than in most of the world.
Martin Hart-Landsberg has done important work on this and he reviews how China is playing a leading role in the real global shift in power. It’s become kind of an assembly plant for regional production systems—Japan, Taiwan, and other Asian economies export parts to China and China provides them with most of the components.
There’s been a lot of concern about the growing U.S. trade deficit with China, but less noticed is the fact that the U.S. trade deficit with Japan and the other Asian countries has declined as this new regional production system takes place. U.S. manufacturers are following the same course —providing parts and components for China to assemble and export—mostly back to the U.S.
For the financial retail institutions like, say, Walmart, ownership and management of manufacturing industries and sectors closely related to the nexus of power—all of this is heavenly.
To understand the public mood its worthwhile to recall that the conventional use of measures of economic growth is highly misleading. There have been efforts to devise more realistic measures—one of them is called the General Progress Indicator. It subtracts from GDP expenditures that harm the public and it adds the value of authentic benefits. In the U.S., the General Progress Indicator has stagnated since the 1970s, although the GDP has grown—with profits going into very few pockets.
By the year 2000, the U.S. was one of the very few countries that had no government inquiry into social indicators. But the correlation with financialization of the economy with neo-liberal economic measures is pretty hard to miss and its not unique to the U.S. by any means.
Deindustrialization
It’s true that there’s nothing new in the process of deindustrialization. Owners and managers naturally seek the lowest labor costs—occasionally there are efforts to do otherwise. Henry Ford is the famous example, but his efforts were struck down by the courts long ago. In fact, it’s a legal obligation for corporation owners and managers to maximize profits. One means of doing this is by shifting production. In early years, the shift was mostly internal, especially to the Southern states. Their labor could be more harshly repressed and major corporations like the first billion dollar corporation—U.S Steel—owned by the sainted philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, could also profit from the new slave labor force that was created by the criminalization of black life in the South after the end of reconstruction in 1877.
That’s being reproduced in part during the recent neo-liberal period—the drug wars used as a pretext—to drive the superfluous population, mostly black, back to the prisons, also providing a new supply of prison labor in state and private prisons, most of it in violation of the International Labor Convention.
In fact, for many African-Americans, since they were exported to the colonies, life has scarcely escaped the bonds of slavery. In the ultra-respectable Bulletin of the Academy of Arts and Sciences we can read that the prison system in American has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history, making the U.S. home to the largest custodial infrastructure for the mass depredation of liberty to be found on the planet. As is the fact that the U.S. leads the world not only in incarceration rates, but in executive compensation.
It’s easy to dismiss the ways in which Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, which are genuine, but its far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions, and particularly to ask ourselves why the radical imagination is failing to offer them a constructive path.
Those who have real grievances are indeed being mobilized, but mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to the rest of us and the world. Joe Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The Communist Creed: from each according to his ability to each according to his need; The capitalist Creed: from each according to his gullibility to each according to his greed.”
Stack minces no words about the Capitalist Creed—we can only speculate about what he meant by the Communist Creed that he counterposed to it. I think its likely that he saw it as an ideal with a genuine moral force. If that’s so, it wouldn’t be very surprising. You may be old enough to recall a poll taken in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, in which people were given a list of statements and asked which ones they thought were in the Constitution. At that time, no one had a clue what was in the Constitution. The one statement that received a solid majority was Joe Stack’s Communist Creed.
Anti-Tax Extremism
A recent Tea Party convention produced a catechism for candidates. One requirement was that they must agree to scrap the tax code. This anti-tax extremism is not as suicidal as Joe Stack’s desperate action, but it is suicidal nonetheless. What’s happened in California is an illustration. The world’s greatest education system was being systematically dismantled. California’s plight resulted in large part from anti-tax fanaticism.
At the same time, a very powerful states” rights movement has taken shape, demanding that the federal government not intrude on state affairs. That’s a nice illustration of what Orwell called doublethink—the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts while believing both of them. It’s practically a motto for our times. Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of the business propaganda that dominates the doctrinal system. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear government for very good reasons—the government is the only existing power system that, in principle, and sometimes in fact, is answerable to the public and can put some restraints on the depredations of private capital and power. The corollary to getting government off our backs is the growing weight of an unaccountable private tyranny. Something libertarians don’t seem to understand.
So anti-government propaganda has to be nuanced. Business, of course, favors a powerful state which serves Adam Smith’s principle argument that it protect the owners of society—maybe not the merchants and manufacturers, but multinationals and financial institutions. Constructing this internally contradictory propaganda message is no easy task.
One illustration is the public attitude to April 15 when tax returns are due. In a functioning democracy, April 15 would be a day of celebration because we’re coming together to implement programs that we’ve chosen. In the U.S. it’s a day of mourning: some alien force is descending on us to steal our hard earned dollars. That’s a graphic indication of the intense efforts of the highly class conscious business community to win what its own publications call “the everlasting battle for the minds of men.”
The Great Killer: Ronald Reagan
The stunning illustration of the success of propaganda— which had an impact on the future—is the cult of the great killer and torturer, Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era who had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal murderers and terrorists around the world—from the most dedicated killers in Latin America to the South Africa racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people during the Reagan years and had to be supported by the U.S.as they were under attack from Mandela’s African National Congress, one of the notorious “terrorists” groups in the world, as the Reaganites determined in 1988 and on and on with remarkable consistency.
Naturally, Reagan’s brutal record was quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il Sung. Among other feats, he was anointed as the apostle of free markets while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other post-war presidents combined—and while implementing massive interventions in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced so illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred for working people was exceeded only by his contempt for the “rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.”
The outcome taught us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture which we live in. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a transformative figure. Painfully, many of the Joe Stacks whose lives he was ruining joined in the adulation and hastened to find shelter under the umbrella of power and violence that Reagan symbolized.
All of this evokes memories of other days. One example which should not be forgotten is the Weimar Republic that was the peak of western civilization in the sciences and the arts and was regarded as a model of democracy. Through the 1920s, the traditional liberal and conservative parties that had always governed entered into inexorable decline, well before the process was affected by the great depression.
The coalition that elected General Hindenburg in 1925 was not very different from the mass base that swept Hitler into office eight years later, compelling Hindenburg, an aristocrat, to select as chancellor, the “little corporal” he detested. As late as 1928, the Nazis had less than 3 percent of the vote. Two years later, the most respectable Berlin Press was lamenting the site of millions in this highly civilized country who had given their vote to the “crude charlatan.”
The Center Had Collapsed
The public, as it turns out, was coming to despise the incessant wrangling of Weimar politics, their service of powerful interests and their failure to deal with popular grievances. They were being drawn to the forces that were upholding the grandeur of the nation, defending it against perceived threats in a revitalized, armed, unified state which was going to march to a glorious future lead by the charismatic figure who, in his words, was carrying out the will of eternal providence and the creator of the universe.
By May 1993, the Nazis had largely destroyed not only the traditional parties, but the large working class parties—social democrats and communists—which had been quite strong—along with their powerful associations. The Nazis declared May Day 1933 to be a workers’ holiday. That was something the left parties had never been able to achieve and many working people took part in the large patriotic demonstrations, more than a million in what was called Red Berlin. By the onset of the war, 90 percent of Germans were marching with the Brownshirts.
Well, the world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless lessons to keep in mind and even memories. I’m just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi Barbarism. The distinguished scholar of German history, Fritz Stern, tells us that he has the future of the U.S. in mind when he recalls the historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason. If that sounds familiar, it is.
The popular mood today, in the U.S., is complex in ways that are both hopeful and troubling. One illustration is the attitudes toward social spending on the part of people who identify themselves in polls as anti-government. A recent scholarly study is kind of illuminating. It finds that by large majority, they support maintaining or expanding spending on social security, child care, aid to poor people and other social welfare measures. But that falls off sharply when it comes to aid to blacks and welfare recipients.
In the population as a whole, the majority thinks the government is spending too little to protect the nation’s health and on Social Security, drug addiction, etc, though again there is an exception for blacks on welfare.
These results give some indication of what might be achieved by commitments that are far short of the radical imagination and of some of the impediments that are going to have to be overcome for these and much more far reaching purposes.
The Massachusetts election which undermined majority rule in the Senate, gives some further insight into what can happen when the center does not hold and those who believe in even limited measures of reform fail to reach the population. The election, as you probably know, was to fill the seat of it’s “ liberal lion,” Ted Kennedy. Scott Brown, a Republican, ran (and won) as the 41st vote against health care which Kennedy had fought for throughout his political life. A majority it turns out voted for Brown, but primarily because Obama’s health care proposals gave away too much to the insurance industry. And much the same was true nationally, according to polls on which headlines are based.
One interesting feature was the voting pattern among union members—Obama’s natural constituency, you’d think. Most of them didn’t bother to vote but among those who did, the majority chose Brown. Union leaders and activists explained why. They said workers were angered by Obama’s record generally, but were particularly incensed by his stand on health care because he didn’t insert a public option or an employer mandate to provide insurance. It was hard not to notice that the only issue on which he took a strong stand was taxing benefits on health care, an issue that had been won by union struggles and which he retracted. There was a massive infusion of funds from financial executives in the finals days of the campaign—one part of a broader phenomenon that reveals dramatically why Joe Stack and others have every reason to be disgusted at the farce that they were taught to honor as a democracy. Obama’s primary constituency all along was financial institutions, their power had increased enormously. Their share of corporate profits rose from a few percent in the 1970s to almost a third of that today. They preferred Obama to McCain and they largely bought the election for him and expected to be rewarded, and they were.
You may remember, at some point in Obama’s presidency, responding to the rising anger of the Joe Stacks, Obama began to criticize the greedy bankers who’d been rescued by the public and he even proposed some measures to constrain their excesses. Punishment for this deviation was swift. The major banks announced immediately and prominently—on the front page of the New York Times—that they would shift funding to Republicans if Obama persisted with his offensive rhetoric and Obama heard the message. Within days, he informed the business press that bankers were good guys, singling out the chairs of JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs for special praise. And he assured the business world that, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people’s success or wealth, that’s part of the free market system.”—not, in fact, how free markets are interpreted in state capitalist doctrine.
In fairness, we should concede that the greedy bankers had a point. Their task is to maximize profits and market share. As is mentioned earlier, that’s their legal obligation. If they don’t do it, they’ll be replaced by somebody who will. These are the inherent market inefficiencies that require them to ignore what’s called systemic risk. They know full well when something’s going to tank the economy but externalities are not their business. It’s also unfair to accuse them of irrational exuberance—Alan Greenspan’s phrase in his extremely brief departure from orthodoxy during the tech boom of the 1990s.
Their exuberance was not at all irrational, it was quite rational in the knowledge that when it all collapses, they can flee to the shelter of the nanny state, clutching their copies of Milt Friedman and Ayn Rand.
The same is true of the chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the rest of the business leaders who are running a huge propaganda campaign to convince the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—with great success. Those who believe in the “liberal hoax” have declined to about a third of the population. The executives who are dedicating themselves to this task know perfectly well that the hoax is very real and the prospects very grim. But the fate of the species is one of the externalities that they must ignore insofar as market systems prevail.
Returning to the instructive Massachusetts election, it turns out that the major factor in Scott Brown’s victory was voting patterns. In the affluent suburbs, the voting was high and enthusiastic. In the urban areas, which are heavily democratic, the voting was low and apathetic. The message was clear: from the rich, we want even more that what you’re given us. From the rest, the message was Joe Stack’s (in his words,) “politicians are not in the least bit interested in me or in anything I have to say” though they’re very much interested in the voices of the masters.
Well, the popular anger is very real and its entirely understandable with the banks thriving from the bailouts and other benefits they’re getting from the nanny state while the population remains in deep recession. Half of Americans would probably like to see every member of Congress defeated in the next election, including their own representatives. The public perception of democracy is almost as negative as the aspirations of the business world (they hate democracy) which is now lobbying fiercely to insure that even shareholders have no say in the choice of managers.
To quote the Wall Street Journal, “some liberals are seeking to find a fair position that straddles the divide between companies and shareholder.” That’s an interesting phrase—the divide between the companies and the people who own the companies (shareholders). Of course, the companies are right in that they are recognizing the decision of the courts a century ago that the corporations should be identified with the management—the shareholders are irrelevant, like the rest of the population.
It’s true that there was a federal stimulus. Even though it was much too small, it did have an effect; it’s estimated that it saved about two million jobs, according to the Congressional Budget office. But the perception of the Joe Stacks that it was a bust has a basis. Over a third of government spending is by states and the decline in states’ spending approximated the federal stimulus so the aggregate fiscal expenditure was flat. Once again, those who are harmed are shooting themselves in the foot by demanding states rights.
Constructive Alternatives?
That’s what can be expected in the absence of constructive alternatives. Are there alternatives? Take a look at the industrial heartland in Ohio where General Motors continues to close plants. One of the few journalists in the U.S. who pays attention to labor issues, reported from the scene of one closed plant. He wrote that President Obama never sought to reopen the factory even after the federal government became controlling shareholder in GM—during one of the bailouts. What Obama did instead was to try and ease the pain by sending an ambassador as a salve to the communities wounds, offering hope, but the aid was suggestions which couldn’t be implemented. Mean- while another ambassador—the secretary of transpor tation—was sent to Spain to offer federal stimulus money to Spanish firms to produce high speed rail facilities that the U.S. badly needed.
But these facilities could be produced by the highly skilled workforce that was reduced to penury in Ohio while Obama shut down the factory. That was Joe Stack’s experience in Harrisburg.
In 1999, Representative Lahood introduced a bill that would have provided Federal funding for transportation infrastructure which would have authorized the treasury to provide $72 billion a year in interest-free loans to state and local governments for capital investments that included transportation infrastructure. Rather than ask for a loan, the bill called for using U.S. notes, as FDR did to finance the depression and Lincoln did to finance the war. That was 1999. In 2010, Lahood was using federal stimulus to obtain contracts in Spain for the same purpose. Another sign of how the center has been disappearing in the past 30 years. The radical imagination should suggest an answer. The factory in question and many others could be taken over by the workforce and they could be converted to the production of high speed rail facilities and other badly needed goods.
I said radical, but the idea is not particularly radical. In the 19th century it was intuitively obvious to New England workers that those who work in the mills should own them and the idea that wage labor differed from slavery only in that it was temporary was so common that it was a slogan of Lincoln’s Republican Party.
Rekindling the Radical Imagination
During years of financialization and deindustrialization there have been repeated efforts to implement worker and community takeovers of closing plants. A few have succeeded, but not most. But the idea has immediate moral appeal to the affected workforce and they should be quite feasible with sufficient public support. And this would be far-reaching in its implications.
For the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and become directly engaged in the popular struggles they have sometimes helped galvanize. We can take heart from the countless small actions of unknown people that are at the root of the great moments in history; the countless Joe Stacks who, instead of destroying themselves, would rather lead the way to a better future.
Z