[THS] !!!!!! Chris Hedges: This Country Needs a Few Good Communists

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/

"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."
 

This Country Needs a Few Good Communists

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
used 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.