Power Systems (8 page)

Without any leadership, more or less spontaneously the movement has developed a “let a hundred flowers bloom” mentality, which I think is a good thing. They didn't develop a party line, like, say, the old Communist Party. Or to take a contemporary analogue, the Republican Party. The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn't happening, no taxes on the rich.

There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble. Part of the catechism is, if somebody is out there that we don't like or we think might harm us, “we kill them,” as Romney's put it.
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One person in the Republican debate, Ron Paul, said, “Maybe we ought to consider a golden rule…in foreign policy,” treat others the way we want them to treat us.
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He was practically booed off the stage. That's reminiscent of the old Communist Party.

The Occupy movements are quite right to try to avoid this quasi-totalitarian structure. On the other hand, consensus can go too far, like any other tactic. I think the criticism that Occupy hasn't come up with actual proposals or demands is just not true. There are lots of proposals that have come out of Occupy. Many of them are quite feasible, within reach. In fact, some even have mainstream support from places like the
Financial Times,
things like a financial transaction tax, which makes good sense.

 

That's the former Tobin tax, put forward by the economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin, sometimes called the Robin Hood tax.

 

Yes. A financial transaction tax would make a big difference in some countries, if it were done properly. The absolute refusal to tax the superrich is another part of the Republican catechism. Going after that—and dealing with radical inequality—makes perfectly good sense.

So does creating jobs. The basic problem we face is not a deficit but rather joblessness. A majority of the population agrees with that.
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But the banks don't agree, so therefore it's not discussed in Washington.

We could have a reasonable health care system, like other industrial countries. Not exactly utopian. Again, fighting for that makes perfectly good sense. A single-payer health care system has a lot of popular support, but the financial institutions are against it, so it's not even discussed. A national health care system would, incidentally, eliminate the deficit, among other things—not that the deficit is all that important.

There are further goals I don't think are unfeasible but could be revolutionary in import. So, for example, if a multinational corporation is shutting down an efficient manufacturing installation because it doesn't make enough profit for them and they would rather shift it to China, the workforce and community could decide that they want to take it over, purchase it, direct it, and keep it running. In fact, that's something proposed in standard works of business economics, which point out that there is no law of economics or capitalism that says firms have to act in the interest of shareholders, not stakeholders. The stakeholder is anybody their actions have an impact on: the workforce, the community, others.

The Occupy movement could at least be as imaginative as a standard business economics text. If they pursue that, it could lead to quite far-reaching changes.

 

The sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein says, “Capitalism is at the end of its rope.”
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Is it too soon to be talking about the end of capitalism?

 

I don't even know what it means. First of all, we've never had capitalism, so it can't end. We have some variety of state capitalism. If you fly on an airplane, you're basically flying in a modified bomber. If you buy drugs, the basic research was done under public funding and support. The high-tech system is permeated with internal controls, government subsidies. And if you look at what are supposed to be the growing alternatives, China is another form of state capitalism. So I don't know what's supposed to be ending.

The question is whether these systems, whatever they are, can be adapted to current problems and circumstances. For example, there's no justification, economic or other, for the enormous and growing role of financial institutions since the 1970s. Even some of the most respected economists point out that they're just a drag on the economy. Martin Wolf of the
Financial Times
says straight out that the financial institutions shouldn't be allowed to have anything like the power they do.
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There's plenty of leeway for modification and change. Worker-owned industries can take over. There's interesting work on this topic by Gar Alperovitz, who has been right at the center of a lot of the organizing around worker control.
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It's not a revolution, but it's the germ of another type of capitalism, capitalism in the sense that markets and profit are involved.

 

Howard Zinn once commented, “There is a basic weakness in governments—however massive their armies, however wealthy their treasuries, however they control the information given to the public—because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When these people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and when they withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy, and its power.”
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He also wrote that people “know with supreme clarity—when their attention is not concentrated by the government and the media on waging war—that the world is run by the rich.”
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That's basically correct. And incidentally, without taking anything away from Howard, it's an old principle. I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in “Of the First Principles of Government,” where he pointed out that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”
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Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we—not he—would call a totalitarian state, it's the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren't able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse.

When coercion doesn't work anymore, you have to turn to persuasion. In the rich, developed societies this has become an art form. In Britain and the United States, the freest societies about century ago, it was very clearly recognized by the leadership, the Tory Party in Britain, intellectuals in the United States, that the limits of coercion had been reached. People had won too much freedom—parliamentary labor parties, labor unions, women's rights groups. So you had to turn to control of attitudes and opinion. That's the origins of the public relations industry. Edward Bernays, the guru of the U.S. public relations industry, a liberal progressive, expressed the standard view, which wasn't novel to him: “Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.”
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We somehow have to persuade or change the attitudes of the population so they will be willing to hand power over to us. Whoever presents these views is always part of the “intelligent minority.” And the way we do it is through propaganda. The term was used openly then. In fact, Bernays titled his book
Propaganda.
The word took on bad connotations in the 1930s, but before that it was used freely. Now it's called advertising or public relations.

Those are the foundations of the industries of control of opinions and attitudes, driving people to consumerism and marginalizing them in various ways. Huge resources are devoted to this. Marketing is mostly a form of propaganda. If anybody believed in markets, which only ideologues do, but if, say, business believed in markets, they wouldn't do anything like the marketing they do today. If you take an economics course, they teach you that markets are based on informed consumers making rational choices. But business devotes huge resources to trying to create uninformed consumers who make irrational choices. It's obvious as soon as you look at an advertisement. If you had a market system, General Motors, let's say, would put up a thirty-second ad on television saying, “Here are the characteristics of the cars we're selling next year.” They obviously don't do that, because they want to undermine markets.

In fact, political and business leaders want to under-mine democracy the same way. Democracy, you learn in eighth grade, is made up of informed voters making rational choices, but the political parties certainly don't believe in that. That's why they have slogans, rhetoric, public relations displays, extravaganzas, anything but saying, “Here's what I'm going to do. Vote for me.” So the fear and hatred of markets and of democracy basically have the same roots.

Again, the point is correct. Hume is the first person who articulated it clearly, as far as I know. The public does have power, and it's the task of the powerful and their minions—the priests, the intellectuals, others—to try to marginalize them, to get the public away from power. We have Walter Lippmann, the famous leading public intellectual of the twentieth century, also a progressive, saying that we've got to protect the responsible men, the intelligent minority, from the “trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”
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That's what the huge public relations industry is devoted to.

 

In late 2011,
New York Times
columnist David Brooks reported that a Gallup poll showed that in answer to the question “Which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future—big business, big labor, or big government?” close to 65 percent of respondents said the government and 26 percent said corporations.
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Is that an example of the persuasion and manufacturing of consent that you alluded to?

 

If you look a little bit beyond that question and you ask, “What do you want the government to do?” the answer will be, “Stop bailing out the banks. That's why I hate the government. Don't bail out the banks. Stop freeing the rich from taxes. I want more taxes on the rich. Increase spending on health and education.” And so on down the line. So yes, the question is framed so that people like David Brooks can draw this conclusion.

Take welfare. There's strong public opposition to welfare. On the other hand, there's strong public support for what welfare does. So if you ask the question, “Should we spend more on welfare?” No. “Should we spend more on aid to women with dependent children?” Yes.
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That's successful propaganda. Welfare has been successfully demonized. Reagan took a big step forward on that, sort of constructing an image of welfare as meaning a rich, black woman who drives to the welfare office in her chauffeured limousine and takes away your hard-earned money. Nobody is in favor of that, so no welfare. But what about a mother with a child that she can't feed? Oh, yes, we're in favor of helping her.

In fact, if you look at the 1960s, there were significant changes in the way these issues were conceived. A useful study of this shift just came out in
Political Science Quarterly
.
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The New Deal conception was that support for people's needs was a right. So, say, a mother with dependent children had a right to food for her children. That began to shift in the 1960s. As the welfare system was expanded, a shift began toward the conception that you can get support but you really ought to be working, ultimately leading to the move from welfare to workfare. By the time you get to Clinton, the right to food for your children is not really a right.
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It's only something until you get a job, which is what you ought to be doing. This is based on the idea that taking care of children isn't work. It's an amazing conception. Anyone who has taken care of children knows it's work, hard work. Even from an economic point of view, adopting the rather ugly terminology of standard economics, it creates what's called “human capital.” In economics courses, human capital, the quality of the workforce, is terribly important. How do you get human capital in a four-year-old child? When the mother is at home taking care of him, not letting him run out in the streets while she's washing dishes in a restaurant. And, of course, there's almost no support for the working family, so you destroy the family. It's a very striking shift in mentality.

The driving force behind these changes is people who claim that they are fighting for “family values.” The people who call themselves conservatives say, “We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That's how we preserve family values.” The internal contradictions are amazing.

 

Talking about the mechanisms of domestic control reminds me of Aristotle's comments about democracy. What did he have to say about democracy?

 

In his book
Politics,
which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems—oligarchy, monarchy—and didn't like any of them particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people—people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women—had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this.
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