Remembering Guaidó’s Last Stand

[Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images]

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

The year of our Lord 2020 will likely go down in the history books as one of the most existentially ridiculous years ever. It began with President Donald Trump belligerently assassinating Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was on a peace mission in Iraq. Unlike many controversial Middle Eastern figures, Solemani was universally beloved in Iran and played a leading role in the defeat of ISIS in Syria. Shortly thereafter, Chinese officials isolated a novel coronavirus strain noticing a strange influenza-like ailment afflicting residents in and around the city of Wuhan weeks earlier. Needless to say, the coronavirus behind what is now referred to as Covid-19 has led to a massive global pandemic. On May 25, with said catastrophe in full effect, a white Minneapolis police officer lynched an unarmed, nonviolent black man named George Floyd, causing nationwide rebellions and calls to defund/abolish the institution of American policing. And that’s just the tip of the quickly melting iceberg.

It has certainly been a hell of a year. But there’s a special little story that may have barely registered on the radar of all but the most avid connoisseurs of current events. During the first week of May, a ragtag gang of mercenaries launched from Colombia and was quickly apprehended by Venezuelan forces and socialist fishermen after attempting to invade the neighboring country via the coastal La Guaira State and the peninsula of Chuao. In the wake of this misadventure, news broke that two of the approximately sixty combatants were in fact American citizens and former Green Berets Luke Denman and Airan Berry. This embarrassingly botched mission, coined “Operation Gideon”, was quickly revealed to be yet another coup attempt against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the Bolivarian government more broadly. A leaked contract described tactics that included captures, assassinations, drone strikes, and even death squads in order to “liberate” the oil-rich nation.

The lead planner behind the foiled operation was none other than Silvercorp CEO Jordan Goudreau. Gourdreau's Florida-based private security firm was contracted for $212.9 million, yet only offered the aforementioned mercenaries between $50,000 and $100,000 each for their life-threatening services. Silvercorp USA initially began with hopes of converting military veterans into school security personnel — theoretically to protect students from school shooters for a small subscription fee — but the scheme appears to have been shelved. Gourdreau, himself a U.S. Army veteran, teamed up with retired Venezuelan General Cliver Alcala, who had previously been involved in various coup plots, often with assistance from the right-wing Colombian government. This was supposed to be Silvercorp’s big break.

As journalist Lucas Koerner summarized, “Jordan Goudreau, 43, was responsible for training a contingent of 300 Venezuelan army deserters in Colombia, who were to penetrate Venezuela in a heavily armed caravan and seize the capital of Caracas within 96 hours.” These details and more had been laid out in the aforementioned contract, which, thankfully, also contained an equal opportunity employment clause, promising to be inclusive “across gender, ethnicity, age, disabilities and national origin…”

One of the most notable aspects of the contract, however, is the fact that it named Juan Guaidó as the operation’s “Commander in Chief.” Guaidó, who initially denied any involvement, is a disgraced Venezuelan politician who clumsily declared himself “interim president” of the Bolivarian republic early last year and has since become embroiled in a corruption scandal.

The political trajectory of Guaidó is fascinating in its own right. In 2007, after graduating from Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Guaidó moved to Washington, D.C. to study under neoliberal economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia at George Washington University. Later that year, he took part in anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government declined to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) — a privately owned station that played a prominent role in the 2002 coup attempt against then-president Hugo Chávez (an event chronicled in a documentary entitled, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). And thus began Guaidó’s tumultuous tenure in the realm of Venezuelan politics.

The young Guaidó continued taking part in anti-government demonstrations with “Generation 2007” youth activists, and, in 2009, helped establish the Popular Will Party with infamous right-wing political figure Leopoldo Lopez. During the subsequent years, Guaidó met with various regime change specialists and wealthy business owners, and even participated in the violent guarimbas in 2014, which aimed to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the government. The emerging political figure then proceeded to publicly whitewash the deadly tactics used by right-wing protesters, presenting himself as a polished and professional advocate for democracy.

Guaidó also participated in Venezuela’s National Assembly, spending many years as an alternate deputy, until the 2015 elections when he narrowly secured a seat on the governing body. The opposition-dominated National Assembly eventually selected Guaidó as its president — a position that is awarded on a rotating basis. This new development made Guaidó the perfect candidate for Washington’s regime change efforts. Despite still being unknown to 81% of Venezuelans, Guaidó declared himself “interim president” on January 22, 2019 with the full support of the Trump administration. What followed was a series of Western media misinformation campaigns, bungled coup attempts, and, after all else failed, a new wave of U.S. economic sanctions that killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

After losing his National Assembly seat in early January, 2020, Guaidó staged a childish scene in which he attempted to climb over the fence surrounding parliament. The floundering politician then faded from the spotlight until the recent failed incursion. Indeed, Operation Gideon — also referred to as “Stupid Bay of Pigs” — appears to have been a pathetic, last-ditch effort to install Guaidó as Venezuela’s president and implement a program of neoliberal “shock therapy”, primarily focused on privatizing the country's vast oil reserves.

Though appearing exotic on its surface, this quaint anecdote also fits into the “bigger picture” of 2020’s troubling zeitgeist. As part of its long-standing policy of violent imperialism throughout Latin America, the U.S. government funded the aforementioned 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, hoping to oust popular president Hugo Chávez. Despite its consistent two-decade commitment to disrupting the progressive Bolivarian Revolution, the world’s only remaining empire has evidently failed miserably. This defeated regime change effort mirrors other recent U.S. foreign policy failures, such as that of the devastating Syrian proxy war. In keeping with its increasingly desperate imperial ambitions, the U.S. has now lashed out against China — its main competitor on the global stage and a nation that has aided Venezuela amid the aforementioned brutal sanctions. The epic downfall of Juan Guaidó is not only a tale of personal and professional shortcoming, but could also symbolize a decline in the neoliberal global order more broadly, with new possibilities on the horizon.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Imperialist Propaganda and the New Cold War With China

PHOTO CREDIT: FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/MADOKA IKEGAMI-POOL/GETTY IMAGES/DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

On January 24, a headline in the right-wing Washington Times read, “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The claim was largely debunked and ignored. However, the story was then notably resuscitated by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in April. By the end of the piece, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Shortly thereafter, the claim spread to Fox News and other mainstream outlets. Soon enough, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump publicly promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory.

According to prominent sources within the scientific community, the virus in question almost certainly has natural origins. For instance, an article featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature explained:

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. […] Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.”

Furthermore, The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 public health scientists from eight countries who “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter continues by clarifying that “scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

In short, the sensational claim that the virus originated in a Chinese lab has absolutely no supporting evidence. This specific case of anti-China propaganda is simply fuel on the pre-existing fire of unfounded Western smears against this rising power in the East. For instance, in August of 2018, prominent Western news media outlets began claiming that the United Nations had compiled reports of Chinese government “internment camps” in which as many as one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims were being held. However, upon further inspection, the claim deteriorated. It turned out that the U.N. as a whole had made no such statement, and that the explosive assertion came from a single individual, Gay McDougall, who was the sole American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

According to the Associated Press, McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the [U.N.] hearing.” Despite the complete absence of evidence for this serious charge, more propaganda subsequently surfaced from other dubious Western sources, including a U.S. government-funded “activist group” called the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). According to The Grayzone, “ the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.” The CHRD has even endorsed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, a neoconservative who has expressed racist views toward Chinese people and supports colonialism.

During his recent trip to China, journalist Danny Haiphong didn’t see “internment camps” in Xinjiang Province. Haiphong further explained that “it is difficult to walk more than a mile without running into a mosque. Every street sign in the city is translated in both Mandarin and Uyghur languages. Security is more plentiful in Ürümqi than in Beijing or Xi’an, and for good reason. Most Westerners are unaware that Xinjiang Province is the site of numerous terror attacks that have taken the lives of hundreds of people.” Due to the ongoing threat of Islamist terrorism, Xinjiang “has set up vocational and training centers in accordance with the law to provide courses on Mandarin, laws, vocational skills and deradicalization programs for people influenced by religious extremism and terrorism.”

Nevertheless, relying heavily on unsubstantiated Western propaganda of the aforementioned variety, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act late last year. The bill, which includes additional economic sanctions, is part of a larger pattern of new Cold War-style escalations between the two powerful nations. With these tensions comes a surge in Sinophobic hate crimes buttressed by bipartisan, racist rhetoric from American politicians, replacing the hysterical Russophobia of yesteryear. As noted in the New York Times, this onslaught is “reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

After its “breathtaking” response to the recent coronavirus outbreak, China has found itself further entrenched in a hybrid war with the American empire. As journalist Pepe Escobar explained, “For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat…” It is certainly true that China is undermining America’s global hegemony by engaging in international solidarity efforts with nations that have historically been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc.). Due to the evident domestic decline of American society, this ongoing cooperation between those consistently demonized, sanctioned, invaded, or otherwise targeted by the West could become a model for a multi-polar global future. 

On October 10, 1990, a shocking testimony was given to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah. The distraught teenager recounted an event she said she had witnessed as a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital after the Iraqi invasion earlier that year. “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying,” the girl proclaimed. Although it was partially used to justify the Gulf War, the story turned out to false, just like the narrative that was used to justify the subsequent 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Iraq is not unique. Imperialist lies have also been used to justify American aggression in Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and countless other sovereign nations around the world. Even the justification for the Vietnam War turned out to be fabricated. Such falsehoods have allowed the American empire to violently ravage the globe for decades to protect its so-called economic interests. Now that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is providing a viable alternative to the battle-scarred neoliberal capitalist model, the imperfect, yet successful economic power that lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty is being maligned with spurious propaganda. Don’t believe the hype.

The Colonial Gaze in Overdrive: The Latest Rumors and Allegations About the DPRK

Photo: KIM WON-JIN / Contributor / Getty Images

By Derek R. Ford

After weeks of wild speculation about his health, which began as rumors that he was undergoing surgery and escalated into claims that he had in fact died, Chairman Kim Jong Un visually appeared in the media at a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new fertilizer plant. It was yet another case of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK, or North Korea) magical ability to raise someone from the dead.

All of the think tank experts and media outlets are now struggling to confirm their initial theory by comparing the movement of Chairman Kim’s legs before his “disappearance” and during the ceremony and by ruminating on a “mysterious mark” on his wrist.

Lest the rumors die, on May 03 the South Korean military reported that four bullets fired from the north hit the wall of a South Korean guard post along the Demilitarized Zone. In response, troops in the south fired 20 warning shots.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff officer said the shots were unintentional, as conditions were foggy and the shots came when Korean People’s Army soldiers typically change shifts and check firearms. US Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo agreed with the assessment. Given the highly sensitive nature of the situation, the DPRK hasn’t formally responded at this point, and there hasn’t actually been any evidence confirming that the shots came from the north, let alone from the Korean People’s Army.

Despite this, speculation abounds that it was intentional. The most quoted source is Choi Kang, vice president of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, who told Reuters: “Yesterday, Kim was trying to show he is perfectly healthy, and today, Kim is trying to mute all kinds of speculation that he may not have full control over the military.”

Dr. Choi’s hypothesis might make sense if the DPRK’s military consisted of a few guys with guns. Maybe then it could be an assertion of control. But the country has an incredibly sophisticated military, and firing four rounds of ammunition isn’t much of a statement.

It might make sense if the DPRK had absolutely anything to gain from such an action. They don’t. In fact, such an action could only hurt them insofar as it is treated as a “provocative” action by the US. Whenever the DPRK does basically anything, from testing missiles to launching communications satellites, they’re quickly and routinely—and uniquely—condemned. This is an unjust situation, but one of which the North’s leadership is acutely aware. And now the United Nations Command is investigating to determine whether the shots violated the armistice agreement signed in 1953 to end—or pause—the US-led war against Korea.

It might make sense if the DPRK was looking to antagonize their fellow Koreans in the south. But that’s not the case. In April 2018, Chairman Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in signed the historic Panmunjom Declaration, the second point of which was to eliminate military tensions. Since then, the two states have made tremendous strides in doing so by removing landmines and dismantling guard posts. US war exercises have continued, although they have been significantly scaled back.

If you’re not visible, you don’t exist

More problematic with Choi’s assertion, however, one that accords with the rumors of Chairman Kim’s death, is the idea that Chairman Kim and the DPRK have something to “prove” to the West. The logic and force of the West’s colonial gaze is in full force here. Chairman Kim is injured or dead simply because he isn’t visible to the West, and the longer he isn’t visible the more likely it is he is dead. Now he’s “trying to show us” he has control of the military.

The colonialist framework holds that the colonized subject exists only insofar as they’re recognized by the colonizing power. This is the framework under which it’s logical for the colonizer to “discover” a land inhabited by people for centuries. After “discovery,” colonialism demands the constant visibility and transparency of the colonized. Any retreat from visibility into opacity is an affront to the colonial power. This explains the constant outrage from the West that the DPRK is “shrouded in secrecy” or a “hermit kingdom: because the West can’t have unfettered access, because they have to deal with assertions of national sovereignty, because they can’t send in weapons inspectors at the will.

The US is, for obvious reason, a significant factor in North Korea’s actions and policies. But as I heard Ri Ki Ho, representative of the DPRK’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in NYC, say at the 2019 Global Peace Forum on Korea: “we’re not obsessed with the US.”

Ri was speaking in the context of the nuclear talks between the US and DPRK, saying that whatever the US did or didn’t do, the DPRK would continue along the path it set forward. It makes perfect sense, but only if we divorce ourselves from the colonialist gaze.

My own take is that the rumors and accusations are primarily intended to halt inter-Korean cooperation. Thus, it’s not a coincidence that the rumors of Chairman Kim’s health coincided with the April 15 legislative elections in South Korea. The ruling Democratic Party and its allied Platform Party (which might be absorbed within the DPK) won a resounding victory, capturing 180 out of the 300 available seats in the National Assembly. The far-right, represented by the Unified Future Party, performed worse than they had in 60 years.

The election was partly a referendum on the Moon government’s engagement with the DPRK, which has encountered obstacle after obstacle primarily in the form of US sanctions and the domination of the US over South Korea’s military. The result was a clear affirmation of engagement, peace, and reunification with their fellow Korean people in the north.

The rumors and accusations, then, can be seen as an attempt to disorient and disillusion the hopes of the South Korean people, and to present these aspirations within Korea as an impossibility to the people of the world. They have the added benefit of obstructing any remaining possibility of a rapprochement between the US and DPRK under the Trump administration. Further, depending on the UNC findings, the accusations of gunfire may result in still more sanctions or something even worse.

Regardless of whatever rumors are flying, whatever allegations are in the air, whatever demonization campaign is circulating, the refrain of everyone interested in peace and justice is the same: The Korean people—in the southern and northern parts of the peninsula and in the diaspora—have the rights to peace, liberation, and self-determination, and we will do whatever we can to help them realize those rights.

Derek R. Ford is an educator and organizer, whose latest book is Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Donald Trump Is Going To Win. Now What?

By J.E. Karla

If we have a scientific view of history we can make confident predictions about the world of politics. It was easy to predict that Bernie Sanders would lose, and even an unrivaled crisis of capitalism couldn’t save his “movement.” Here’s another safe bet: Donald Trump is almost certainly going to be re-elected in November. We know this the same way we know how the coronavirus spreads — with a principled observation of material conditions.

This is depressing, but knowing that Trump has a nearly unbeatable edge frees us up to work on something more useful than the same “lesser evil” strategy we’ve been duped into over and over again.

We are prone to getting duped because most political observers in the US are liberals with an idealist outlook as superstitious as a creationist or fortune teller. Many of them suspect the truth about Trump’s impending victory, but they think it’s because Fox News and other right wing media have somehow hypnotized “working class” voters into ignoring their true self-interest.

The truth is actually the complete opposite. Right wing ideology secures political unity among its subjects precisely because Donald Trump best serves their interests. Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest broadcast alibis for his supporters — highlighting the roles played by non-Trump actors in the coronavirus crisis, for example, a disaster caused by every part of the ruling class, including Trump. The alibis, however, are secondary to the material interests at play, and if Fox and their friends didn’t exist, some other voices would step in to justify reactionary rule.

The basic interests at hand are settler colonialism and white supremacy. The liberal system that the elections ratify actually invented the white middle class — small-scale white capitalists and landowners, managers, technicians, professionals, functionaries, and favored workers. Europe industrialized, destroyed its peasantry and found itself with more people than it could feed. Its ruling class armed this excess population, shipped them to the “New World” and empowered them to secure their existence by expropriating Native people and the enslaved. The resulting political surplus granted to even the poorest “white trash” was both the cheapest social program ever launched and a chief obstacle to any mass mobilization against the large bourgeoisie.

But falling rates of profit have eroded the surplus that made the order work, and the white middle class has been in big trouble since at least 2008. Middle-aged white men have experienced an unprecedented increase in mortality since then, driven by drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. They got laid off from managerial positions or bankrupted during the last economic crisis and never got those jobs or businesses back. Where they didn’t swell the growing ranks of the homeless they landed in dead-end service-industry jobs, took up gig economy piecework, or ended up dependent on disability checks and the painkiller prescriptions that come with them.

Donald Trump’s appeal — Make America Great Again — has always been an unsubtle promise to restore that white supremacist premium. As soon as white voters bought into the plan, he had a nearly insurmountable advantage in the Electoral College — an institution explicitly designed to favor white supremacist parties. Only a nominee that swamps him in popular support could overcome this structural advantage.

Instead, the Democrats are going to nominate Joe Biden. It seems like a blunder on their part, but let’s take a materialist look at this decision too. Between tax cuts, canceled environmental protections, attacks on labor, and gutted social programs Donald Trump has done gangbusters for the bourgeoisie. They made trillions before the coronavirus struck, and they know that he’s the guy most likely to let them kill as many people as they need to for the stock market to get going again.

Most of the liberal class shares these interests; they too benefit from a Trump victory. That’s why they have only opposed him with conspiracy theories or West Wing-style bullshit about “America’s place in the world.” They even downplay the very real harms of his racist policies — they don’t want to stir up the people under attack, their class enemies. Fox News gives viewers a reason to stick with Trump, MSNBC gives viewers arguments they know won’t stick. Liberals don’t really mind if he’s in charge, he just embarrasses them.

The best irony of all: they ended up with the one nominee more embarrassing than Trump.

So the system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, and its major players are acting like they’ve always acted. We can anticipate that it will keep rolling right along no matter how many doors we knock on or how many of us hold our noses and vote for the other rapist. Biden’s long history of reactionary corruption is the only source of any real uncertainty about November’s outcome, as maybe the ruling class will decide to switch horses — they are both going the same direction, after all.

One thing we do know for sure is that the bleeding won’t stop until we cauterize the wound. We can’t heal our disease until we cut the capitalism out of us once and for all. Anything else is superstition, and we now have experimental proof — again — that electoral politics is the worst kind of faith healing, at best.

Capitalist Disinformation: The Inherent Contradictions in Profit-Based "Journalism"

By Marcus Kahn

When you work as an employee, you do what your boss tells you to do. If you didn’t, you’d get fired. You occupy a specialized niche tied to the actual production process, while your boss manages multiple projects and employees from above. Unlike you, who will often only see a sliver of the larger priorities and direction of these projects as it pertains to you executing your function, your boss has access to a broader picture. Your boss’s boss (the owner) gets an even larger picture than that. 

As you move up the ladder priorities change. As an employee, your highest aspiration might be to fulfill your position to an admirable degree with the aim of acclaim and eventually promotion. Your boss might want to see their projects executed successfully and have an incident-free, productive staff. And the owner is concerned with the overall profitability of the company, aka their own pockets. Actions performed at your level and your boss’s level reflect the immediate goals of the individual in that specific role, as it relates to the larger priorities of the owner. And the owner can act purely in their own interests, though the pattern of profit-seeking is decently predictable. You on the other hand, only get to perform as well as you can in the role you’ve been designated, allowed to continue in this role so long as you contribute to the overall profitability of the company through your continued labor (*you’ll probably get paid the same amount no matter how much you produce). 

This is an obvious abstraction of common corporate business models, but the structure is essentially the same across the board. Employees take their directives from managers (an elite and highly stratified subset of employees), who take their orders from owners. The totalitarian, elite-oriented structure of large privately owned companies is either the world’s worst kept secret and everyone passively accepts it, or the best kept secret because elites have managed to subdue our awareness of its existence through various iterations of capitalist ideology. In either case, this structure is ubiquitous in the corporate world. If we apply these principles of hierarchy, domination, and control over production to media corporations, we would expect to find a similar elite-orientation in the behavior of employees (corporate journalists)  and consequently their products (news). 

Take every instance of ‘you’ in the first paragraph and swap it with ‘corporate journalists’, ‘boss’ with ‘editor’ and you have a good sense of the implicit structural pressures facing journalists in large media conglomerates. It’s easy to forget that these media giants are still corporations at their core, and not bastions of objectivity. While the journalists (employees) focus on crafting their story (product), they often have no sense of the larger objectives of their piece due to inadequate information and the ideological constraints on their perspective that likely qualified them for the job in the first place. The distance between the implicit (and perhaps explicit) directives of the executives to editors and the execution of an article in the newsroom and on the ground allows journalists to maintain a cognitive dissonance between the ethical standards and motivations they claim, and the journalistic bias they reproduce.

Though they are often sincere in their commitment to journalistic integrity, journalists’ claims of objectivity are irrelevant given their limited view of the larger corporate entity, and the journalist’s ultimate lack of control over content and direction. Media giants are profit-seeking entities directed by owners and governing boards concerned with the bottom line not only for their name-brand media outlet, but also for a litany of closely associated corporations. By virtue of their vertical command orientation, they will ultimately produce a media product and accompanying ideology that is designed to increase profitability for the owners rather than promote general welfare, in the same way a Big Mac is formulated with profit in mind rather than nutrition or consumer health.

The news we’re getting isn’t good for us, but corporate journalists continue to operate regardless of the dangerous contradiction between their self-image and the impact of their product.

Bernie and Bloomberg Lost the Same Way

By J.E. Karla

It is ironic that both Michael Bloomberg and the “democratic socialists” pushing for Bernie Sanders made the same basic mistake in their failed presidential campaigns. In both cases they made the error of believing that subjective forces were the primary factor in political change -- a voluntarist neglect of objective conditions which they could never overcome. This is a consequence of their shared idealism, the philosophical foundation of all petit-bourgeois politics.

For the Sanders socialists, led by activists in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), their assumption was that grassroots mobilization tactics -- notably door-to-door canvassing -- would activate enough poor people, young people, and leftists to overwhelm the Democratic Party. They argued that a set of tactics expertly deployed would be enough to awaken a dormant objective force that could upend US politics.

They have instead falsified their own hypothesis, demonstrating that either no such force exists in the United States, or that it is not available to these political aims. Had they not blown off their own theoretical development they might have maintained a materialist analysis which would have kept them from wasting millions of dollars in donations and labor time in such a fruitless pursuit. 

They would have started with the premise that the primary objective factor in all historical change is the class struggle. From there they would have investigated the class character of the United States -- an imperialist settler state, the hegemonic power of global capitalism -- and recognized that the primary purpose of its political system is the continued suppression of colonized people inside and outside its borders. They could then have seen that there is not a single aspect of the elected machinery of the US state that is governed by simple majority rule -- that from the Iowa Caucuses to the Democratic National Convention to the Electoral College to the US Senate and gerrymandered House of Representatives, to unelected and lifetime-appointed judges, conservative minorities have the structural advantage over more progressive majorities. 

They would know that internal colonies within the US are the only domestic forces with an interest in fighting the system of value extraction that underwrites the ruling class, the middle class, and the labor aristocratic “working class.” They could then empirically verify that not only do large majorities of these colonized communities refuse to participate in the electoral system obviously rigged against them, but that there are centuries of well-established efforts to exclude them from the system -- mass incarceration, reduced polling places, privately-funded political campaigns which exclude candidates drawn from these communities, even “common sense” obstacles such as voter registration, exclusion of immigrants and youth from the electorate, and artificially-limited voting locations and periods. 

These communities also know that every time they do start to gather momentum towards mass enfranchisement their leaders are harrassed, intimidated, and killed by the very FBI liberals have learned to love in the era of Trump. Knocking on their doors and politely asking them to ignore all of this is actually insulting, exposing a glaring blind spot in the Sanders movement. 

It is true that objective historical forces created problems for the status quo, too. The dismantling of liberalism after the last crisis has left young people, in particular, declassed and open to social democracy. It promises to restore their former imperialist subsidy now being hoarded by the bourgeois elite. But that elite has a class fraction within it dedicated to cultural production, and this cultural production fraction has an allied element of the petit bourgeoisie -- the liberal political class, with the press at their vanguard. They objectively control the Democratic Party, and had Bernie kept winning, had moderate candidates kept splitting the vote, etc. some other tack would have been taken to deny Bernie the nomination -- they openly discussed many of them on cable news and on Op-Ed pages. 

There was never any chance that Bernie could win, and there isn’t any now. 

The silver lining comes from Bloomberg’s version of this error. Not only did Mike Bloomberg lose, which is wonderful in its own right, but his error stems from a failure to appreciate the bottom-line objective factor in politics: the masses make history. He believed that they were instead a passive substance that he could shape to his own ends with the application of money and professional political communications. But even in their inchoate condition, even with the distortions laid upon their subjective capacities through generations of bourgeois political violence, those hundreds of millions of expertly placed dollars could not budge them whatsoever in the direction of such an obvious fiend. 

Bloomberg’s voluntarism reflected his class position, just as DSA’s did theirs -- the bourgeois billions versus the petit bourgeois begging. The way forward out of this mess is a refusal to play objectively rigged games and to build institutions of mass political power that fundamentally reject ruling-class systems, elections, NGOs, and thus social democracy. Those are the subjective forces that have the potential to seize upon the objective advances of the class struggle and guaranteed crises of capitalist contradiction to come, especially if they are built to fight the attacks that will come early in their development. 

It remains to be seen how many of Bernie’s true believers are actually committed to revolution, and how many just wanted a few new benefits extracted from the very masses they tried -- and failed -- to speak for.  

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

The Attention Industry: From Marketing and Advertising to Mass Media

By Marcus Kahn

When CocaCola flashes a vibrant video clip of a family clinking bottles, what are they doing? How about a car commercial with a movie star that talks more about the feeling of driving the car than its reliability? Or the targeted advertisements on the sidebar on your Facebook page? Are these corporations trying to inform you by presenting logically structured information? The obvious answer is “Of course not. They’re selling you something.” The more sinister, but equally accurate wording argues that the advertiser is trying to manipulate your decision-making paradigm by strategically feeding you sensory data.

The attention industry is tolerated by most Americans, largely because we don’t have a choice. We were all raised on commercials, and it’s gotten to the point where we forget we have a right to cognitive autonomy. If you talk to your parents, they are sure to have a trove of old jingles from companies that no longer exist, and a few especially catchy ones from companies that still do. The mental process that associates a jingle with a feeling is the same one that keeps the Pledge of Allegiance in your head after all these years, and fills your belly with warmth when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Advertising seems different than propaganda because it’s coming from so many sources, rather than one clear institutional distributor, but the mechanisms are the same. Strategically expose a viewer or reader to certain information in order to guide the formation of their beliefs and actions. And the implications of this practice extend far beyond your T.V. screen.

Manufacturing Consent

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explicate the development and aims of the public relations (advertising) industry and link it to the increasing sophistication of political propaganda distribution in the 20th century.

Advertisers create uninformed consumers who make irrational decisions, contravening one of the fundamental principles of market economics (that economic decisions are driven by informed consumers behaving rationally). For instance, if CocaCola was trying to inform a rational consumer, they would talk about the health implications of their product and the features that distinguish their product from that of their competitors. Instead they surround their product with image and rhetoric, generating an abstraction that can be widely disseminated. If Lincoln Motors was trying to appeal to your logical side, they’d feature an ‘expert’ or a series of statistics that prove a Lincoln sedan is a superior investment. But they don’t. Instead Matthew McConaughey says sexy things in sexy ways, and people are seduced into their purchase.

In the same vein, mainstream media outlets create an uninformed electorate who makes irrational decisions. Take Fox News. On the establishment left it is commonly understood that Fox News uses sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant to alter their viewership’s perception of current events and policy. It is also understood to a lesser degree that these viewers support administrations and consequently policies that don’t support their best interests. Tax reform comes to mind as the most obvious example. The liberal intellectual class also perceives the establishment right as serving the interests of large multinational corporations, traditionally identifying oil companies and military contractors, but more recently the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Fox fights tooth and nail to divert attention away from these issues to focus on such pressing matters as the almost hysterical defense of perceived American culture and values.

But there is little self-reflection on the part of the liberal intellectual class as to the sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant used to divert their attention away from pressing issues. These issues, if addressed in policy and action, would threaten the primacy of the corporations who consume and hoard disproportionate amounts of resources and also guide policy and decision making.

The evidence is on the front page of mainstream newspapers every day. Or rather it isn’t. Climate change doesn’t get nearly the coverage it deserves. A recent article in the L.A. Times even cited an academic who argued for the reversibility of the trend, though overwhelming scholarship suggests its disastrous inevitability. Many large corporations would have to undergo expensive overhauls or be abandoned altogether in order to contend with the restrictions of radical climate policy, and the minimal and slanted coverage even in a supposedly left-leaning periodical like the Los Angeles Times is reflective of an attempt to divert public attention away from a pressing issue.

Wealth inequality as a structural flaw inherent to capitalism is never supported in print, and presidential candidates who advocate for a radical departure from the doctrinal status quo are given minimal coverage and dismissed as idealistic, ineffective, or worse. On the other hand, corporate executives who have accumulated obscene amounts of capital are often painted as societal leaders and their opinions are given weight and legitimacy, though their interests differ radically from the vast majority of the publication’s readership. A recent article in the Washington Post, titled “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich” questioned the effectiveness of establishing a wealth tax on the grounds that it would be hard to value assets and that it would encounter constitutional opposition. Despite the more fundamental questions surrounding the construction of the U.S. constitution and the landed interests it was meant to promote, there is a more obvious problem with this analysis. If it’s so easy to value my assets and tax me, why aren’t their preexisting mechanisms in place to value and tax the wealthiest members of our society?

The media’s coverage of American aggression abroad is a topic that Chomsky has covered extensively in numerous books and lectures. Much like wealth inequality and climate change, American aggression is portrayed with remarkable similarity across the limited political spectrum of the mainstream media. To take a particularly egregious example, during and after the American attack on Vietnam, the mainstream media portrayed the ‘mission’ as a tactical blunder undertaken with the best intentions, a sincere but poorly executed attempt to spread democracy. However the public and internal records paint a dire picture, where the ‘war’ itself amounted to genocide and was preceeded by nearly a decade of U.S. backed terrorism and repression. American policy consistently ignored the peace sought on both sides of the developing conflict, prioritizing an ultimate ‘victory’ which involved Vietnam’s complete submission to the political and economic dictates of the United States.

American war crimes and international violations are studiously ignored across the board, whether they take place in POW camps during World War II, in bombings over the skies of Indochina, coups and military operations sponsored by the U.S. in Central America, and the list goes on. Covert operations and military aid to oppressive autocratic regimes that were often propped up by the U.S. in the first place are given little to no space or critical evaluation. And the very reasonable American public opinions on such trivial matters as military spending and military interventionism is ignored. The mainstream media’s coverage of foreign affairs generates the sort of patriotic fervor and conditioned fear that blinds Americans to the human and financial costs of warfare and aggression abroad. In the current climate as in years past, fear of Russian and Chinese state and economic power is often the subject of intense journalistic focus, greasing the wheels for the ceaseless operation of the military-industrial complex as it is justified in print and on the air over and over again.

The consistency among corporately-owned news outlets that claim vast political differences cannot be overemphasized. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model provide a convincing framework for explaining this phenomenon. The network of associations that define media ownership and stewardship of these corporate outlets sheds further light on the complex interplay of power that exists at the top of the corporate world.

Media Ownership and Stewardship

Explicit ownership of a news outlet no longer has sole explanatory power in analyzing how a media outlet behaves. Arthur O. Sulzberger may have some say in what is published in the New York Times, but there is a dense network of corporate relationships that bolsters the institution and guides its decision making. Each mainstream media outlet is not only owned by an individual, family or parent corporation, but also advised by a group of representatives from some of the largest corporations in the American lexicon.

The Sulzberger family has owned the New York Times since 1896, which should send up some red flags. But The New York Times Company Board of Directors also has members associated with McDonald’s, Verizon, Nike, Facebook, Expedia, Etsy, Sony, Pandora, as well as a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns the Washington Post. You’ll find board members associated with General Motors, Xerox, Johnson and Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, a $70bn investment-fund, a large insurance company, and SurveyMonkey.com, which I imagine is capable of gathering massive amounts of data on public opinion.

The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the president of SoftBank investment fund, which nets $32bn in sales every year and is a virtual god in the world of tech investment. I couldn’t find a board of directors for the Los Angeles Times online.

I won’t bother looking into Fox. Everyone knows how that will turn out.

The mechanisms used to manipulate public opinion have gotten infinitely more sophisticated since William Randolph Hearst’s time, though control of the mainstream media today is similarly plutocratic. In the age of big data, the aim and ability to manipulate public opinion should come across as a terrifying feature of the American public discourse. Take Facebook, for example. It is clear how much power even a foreign government can have on American public opinion, regardless of whether or not Trump actively contributed to the Russian misinformation effort. I shudder to think about the powerful effect corporations and other powerful institutions will have on the outcome of this election using the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In the same way that advertisers manufacture the desire for their product by feeding you sensory data, corporately owned news outlets manufacture consent for harmful government policies by publishing information strategically. What’s scarier than the monopolistic bent of marketing-heavy corporations is the transformation of corporate-political propaganda into a hard science. Poll after poll, study after study, has helped to refine the art of public persuasion. This might not seem relevant during a contentious presidential election. Just mute the TV during commercials, right? But the science under development in the public relations industry has always shared close ties with corporate power, and by connection media and politics.

There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be a dark room full of whispered commands. But there is an identifiable pattern of power and influence that permeates the mainstream media; a pattern that can be reframed as a centuries-long marketing campaign to suit the interests of a global class of plutocrats.

Corporations donate to election campaigns for the same reason they place representatives on the boards of major media outlets. They want control over policy and control over public opinion. And though there are a lot of different organizations competing for this privileged access to media and governmental influence, their interests are often aligned. They cooperate across the limited political spectrum of American media to temper rising racial and class awareness.

Though it is subtle, you can identify it with the right questions. Why does the mainstream media only cover a social movement like the Civil Rights Movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War, or more recently the Black Lives Matter or #MeToo movements when they become too powerful to ignore? Why isn’t economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, racial inequality, or climate change the front page story every day, when they’re clearly the most dire threats to the vast majority of people in the short and long-term? Advocating strongly for these issues goes against the best interests and likely the nature of a small yet powerful class of business super-elites. They cooperate to varying degrees on key issues producing a remarkable degree of consistency across the spectrum, from the New York Times to Fox News.

The Capitalist Coup Called Neoliberalism: How and Why It Went Down

By Colin Jenkins

Rich people have always had class consciousness because... they want to stay rich. This collective consciousness led the "founding fathers" of the United States to set up systems of governance that would, first and foremost, protect them (the wealthy, landowning minority) from the landless, working majority (slaves, indentured servants, laborers). Since then, the rich have had undue influence on every aspect of US life: housing, food production and distribution, education, media, and politics. As capitalism has developed well into its late stages, this has led to large concentrations in wealth and power, and thus influence.

In order to maintain control, the rich have learned over time that minimal concessions must be given to the working class to avoid societal unrest. Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas described this process as using the state to steady the "unstable equilibrium." This instability is produced by capitalism's tendency to pool wealth at the top while dispossessing the majority. For much of the 20th century, capitalists in the US were successful in maintaining an internal equilibrium, mainly due to their ravaging of the so-called "third world" through colonialism and imperialism. With this massive theft of resources throughout the global South (Africa and Latin America), a robust "middle class" was carved out from a mostly white sector of the US working class. This "middle class" consisted of workers who were provided a greater share of the stolen loot than their class peers, and thus awarded the "American Dream" that was widely advertised.

The US "middle class" was a crucial development for the rich because it provided a buffer between them and the masses. Due to the relative comfort they were allowed, "middle-class" workers were more likely to support and collaborate with capitalists, even at the expense of their fellow workers who were left struggling for scraps from below. After all, for there to be a middle class, there must be a lower class. Under capitalism, the lower class is the invisible majority by design. The capitalist class shapes dominant culture from above, the middle class serves as the standard bearer of this culture, and the lower class clings to survival mode in the shadows of society. The key for the rich is to keep the invisible majority in check. The "middle class" has always played a crucial role in this.

Despite this balancing act that was maintained for decades, capitalism's internal contradictions became predictably volatile heading into the latter part of the century, culminating into what economist Michael Roberts refers to as the profitability crisis of the 1970s . As the capitalist system was approaching this crisis, US society had already begun confronting social ills stemming from systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and the Vietnam war. Naturally, this moved into the economic sphere, as workers and students began to successfully tie together the array of social injustices to the widespread economic injustice created by the capitalist system. The existence of an invisible majority, the victims of capitalism and its corollary systems of oppression, was uncovered. This scared the rich, enough to where they felt the need to fortify their previously unshakable privileges. After the groundswell of liberation movements that formed during the 60s, which was fueled by a wave of (working) class consciousness from below, the rich decided to organize and weaponize their own (capitalist) class consciousness to protect their assets, collectively, from the threat of democracy.

In examining what had gone wrong in the 60s and why so many people had the audacity to demand more self-determination, the notorious Trilateral Commission convened in 1973, bringing together economic and political elites from North America, Europe, and Japan. The Commission, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica , "reflects powerful commercial and political interests committed to private enterprise and stronger collective management of global problems. Its members (more than 400 in the early 21st century) are influential politicians; banking and business executives; media, civic, and intellectual leaders."

In 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki published a report for the Commission, titled: "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies." In assessing the various movements that gained momentum in the 60s (racial justice, economic justice, anti-war, etc.), the report determined that these "problems" stemmed from an "excess of democracy." Huntington specifically noted that, "the vitality of democracy in the United States in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority." The solution to this, according to the report, was to reverse direction - decrease "governmental activity" and increase "governmental authority" to restrict democratic impulses from the masses and maintain the capitalist power structure internally, while retaining "hegemonic power" internationally. In other words, rather than government serving people and regulating capitalists, government should serve capitalists and regulate people.

Since maintaining a "middle class" had become such a fragile proposition, the capitalist class forged a new direction. Rather than rely on this historical buffer and continue the concessionary and fickle balancing act , they decided it would be more effective to simply take ownership of the legislative and judicial process. This process began when executive officers from several major corporations joined together to form private groups like the Business Roundtable, for the purpose of "promoting pro-business public policy." In other words, to make sure that the "excess of democracy" which occurred during the 60s would never return. Why? Because any such mass movement toward relinquishing power to the people is a direct threat to capitalist profit and corporate America's existence as a collection of unaccountable, authoritarian, exceptionally powerful, private entities. The Business Roundtable, which included executives from corporations like Exxon, DuPont, General Electric, Alcoa, and General Motors, gained instant access to the highest offices of the government, becoming extremely influential in pushing for corporate tax cuts and deregulation during the Reagan era.

Since the 1980s, the Business Roundtable has run roughshod over American workers by using the federal government to:

- reduce consumer protections,

- obstruct employment stimuli,

- weaken unions,

- implement "free trade" agreements that spur offshoring and tax havens,

- ease environmental protections,

- increase corporate subsidies,

- loosen rules on corporate mergers and acquisitions,

- open avenues of profit in the private healthcare system,

- privatize education and social programs,

- and block efforts to make corporate boards more accountable.[1][2][3][4] [5]

As political momentum developed within corporate America, additional players jumped aboard this strategic and highly coordinated capitalist coup. While groups like the Business Roundtable targeted legislation, the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC), a "private, business-oriented lobbying group" which had already served as a popular vehicle for turning (capitalist) class consciousness into action since 1912, shifted its focus onto the court system. Since then, the CoC has used its immense resources to influence US Supreme Court decisions that benefit big business, a tactic that has become increasingly successful for them over time. The CoC's business lobby had " a 43 percent success rate from 1981 to 1986 during the final years of Chief Justice Warren Burger's tenure," a 56 percent success rate from 1994 to 2005 (the Rehnquist Court), and boasted a 68 percent success rate (winning 60 of 88 cases) during John Roberts first seven years as Chief Justice. The CoC improved even more on its pro-corporate, anti-worker attack in 2018, winning 90 percent of its cases during the court's first term. As Kent Greenfield reported for The Atlantic ,

"One measure of the [2018 term's] business-friendly tilt is the eye-popping success rate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the self-proclaimed "Voice of Business." The Chamber filed briefs in 10 cases this term and won nine of them. The Chamber's victories limited protections for whistleblowers, forced changes in the Securities and Exchange Commission, made water pollution suits more difficult to bring, and erected additional obstacles to class action suits against businesses. Only the geekiest of Supreme Court watchers monitor such cases. But the Chamber pays attention, and it pays off."

Groups like the Trilateral Commission, Business Roundtable, and Chamber of Commerce have taken prominent roles on the front lines of the 40-year, capitalist slaughter of American workers, but if there was a single, powerful element that solidified this coup it was a memo written in 1971 by Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo, or Powell Manifesto, as it has come to be known, made its rounds among corporate, economic, and political elites during this crucial time. Powell, a corporate lawyer, board member of nearly a dozen corporations, and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, sent the memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor, Jr., as a call to action for corporate America.

Powell's memo was a diatribe against any and all elements that would dare to question capitalism. While giving mention to "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic," the memo focused on what was viewed as the most immediate threat - the same "excess of democracy" referred to in the Trilateral Commission's report. "What now concerns us is quite new in the history of America," wrote Powell. "We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts" throughout the working class. Powell took special interest in those "from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians" whom he regarded as small in size but "the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking."

Powell's memo laid out a blueprint for the capitalist coup that is now referred to as neoliberalism , including everything from identifying and listing the enemies pushing for self-determination, criticizing the business community for its apathy and lack of urgency in recognizing this growing threat, suggestions for how business executives and the Chamber of Commerce may proceed in obstructing these democratic impulses from below, and even laying out detailed plans on how to infiltrate campuses, the public, media, the political arena, and the courts with pro-capitalist action and propaganda.

Reclaim Democracy, an activist organization based in Montana explains,

"Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy."

At a time of monumental capitalist regrouping and coalescing against the "dangerous rise" of self-determination, the influence of Powell's manifesto is difficult to underestimate. It provided ideological fuel to the birth of a substantial corporate lobbying industry, which produced immeasurable pro-business and anti-worker legislation for decades to come. The memo also served as a wake-up call to capitalists throughout corporate America, supplementing the formation of groups like the Business Roundtable and urging forceful actions from the US Chamber of Commerce. The results, according to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, were undeniable:

"The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping - a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980. On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s." [6]

The real-life effects of this capitalist coup have been disastrous for most. US workers have experienced declining or stagnant wages since the 1970s. As a result, many must rely on credit (if lucky enough to qualify) even to obtain basic necessities, which has resulted in skyrocketing household debt across the board. The debt-to-disposable income ratio of American households more than doubled from 60% in 1980 to 133% in 2007. Meanwhile, any hope of saving money has disappeared. While the household "savings rate roughly doubled from 5% in 1949 to over 11% in 1982, it looks like a downhill ski slope since then," and registered in negative territory by 2006. Conversely, as designed, the rich have benefited immensely, to the point where income inequality has increased to pre-Great Depression levels . Those who orchestrated the coup (the top 1%) claimed about a quarter of all wealth during the 1980s, and now own over 40% of all wealth in the country. To put this in perspective , the bottom 90% of all Americans combined account for barely half of that, claiming 21% of all wealth.

And, perhaps most importantly, the coup helped fund the growth of a massive capitalist propaganda machine to convince the working class to support our own demise. This includes everything from a co-opted and recalibrated liberal media, a rise of right-wing talk radio, and the birth of the Fox News network - all designed to do one thing: "inform and enlighten" workers on the wonders of capitalism and American exceptionalism, the friendly nature of big business, and the "excessive" dangers of self-determination.

As Powell noted in 1971, "If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose (of marketing and selling the idea of capitalism), it would be a statesman-like expenditure." And statesman-like it has become, running interference and garnering " manufactured consent" for a capitalist coup that has been cemented over the course of four decades, six presidential administrations, a Wall Street run amok, and a massive transfer of generations (including future) of public revenue into private hands.

Notes

[1] "The Business Roundtable and American Labor," a report by J. C. Turner, General President International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO (May 1979). Accessed online at http://laborrising.com/2013/07/union-organizing-and-the-business-roundtable-and-american-labor/

[2] "The Anti-Union Game Plan," Labor Notes (July 2, 2018). Accessed online at https://labornotes.org/2018/07/anti-union-game-plan

[3] Lafer, G. (October 31, 2013) "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012," Economic Policy Institute. Accessed online at https://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/

[4] Gilbert, D. (2017) The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (SAGE publications)

[5] Goldfield, M. (1989) The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (University of Chicago Press), p. 192

[6] Hacker, J.S. & Pierson, P. (2011) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster)