No More Learning

All over the world, community in the broader sense--the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong recip- rocal bonds of commonality and kinship--is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market soci- eties. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to cap- italisms implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe," creating "a world after its own image. " No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cul- tures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
Big Capital has no commitment to anything but capital accumu- lation, no loyalty to any nation, culture, or people. It moves inex- orably according to its inner imperative to accumulate at the highest
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possible rate without concern for human and environmental costs. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people s labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. "
More Right than Wrong
Those who reject Marx frequently contend that his predictions about proletariat revolution have proven wrong. From this, they conclude that his analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperial- ism must also be wrong. But we should distinguish between Marx the chiliastic thinker, who made grandly optimistic predictions about the flowering of the human condition, and Marx the econo- mist and social scientist, who provided us with fundamental insights into capitalist society that have held painfully true to the present day. The latter Marx has been regularly misrepresented by anti-Marxist writers. Consider the following predictions:
Business Cycles and the Tendency toward Recession. Marx noted that something more than greed is involved in the capitalist s relent- less pursuit of profit. Given the pressures of competition and rising wages, capitalists must make technological innovations to increase their productivity and diminish their labor costs. This creates prob- lems of its own. The more capital goods (such as machinery, plants, technologies, fuels) needed for production, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins. 2
2 As an industry becomes more capital intensive, proportionately more money must be invested to generate a given number of jobs. But business is not dedicated to creating jobs. In fact, capitalists are constantly devising ways to downsize the workforce. From 1980 to 1990, the net number of jobs created by the biggest corporations in the United States, the "Fortune 500," was zero. The new jobs of that period came mostly from less capital-intensive smaller firms, light industry, service industry, and the public sector.
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Since workers are not paid enough to buy back the goods and ser- vices they produce, Marx noted, there is always the problem of a dis- parity between mass production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. Even when there is ample demand, they are tempted to downsize the workforce and intensify the rate of exploitation of the remaining employees, seizing any opportunity to reduce benefits and wages. The ensuing drop in the workforce s buying power leads to a further decline in demand and to business recessions that inflict the greatest pain on those with the least assets.
Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall and for protracted recessions and economic instability. As the economist Robert Heilbroner noted, this was an extraordinary prediction, for in Marx's day economists did not recognize boom-and-bust business cycles as inherent to the capitalist system. But today we know that recessions are a chronic condition and--as Marx also predicted--they have become international in scope.
Capital Concentration. When the Communist Manifesto first appeared in 1848, bigness was the exception rather than the norm. Yet Marx predicted that large firms would force out or buy up smaller adversaries and increasingly dominate the business world, as capital became more concentrated. This was not the accepted wis- dom of that day and must have sounded improbable to those who gave it any attention. But it has come to pass. Indeed, the rate of mergers and take-overs has been higher in the 1980s and 1990s than at any other time in the history of capitalism.
Growth of the Proletariat Another of Marxs predictions is that the proletariat (workers who have no tools of their own and must work for wages or salaries, selling their labor to someone else) would become an ever-greater percentage of the work force. In 1820 about 75 percent of Americans worked for themselves on farms or in small businesses and artisan crafts. By 1940 that number had dropped to 21. 6 percent. Today, less than 10 percent of the labor force is self-employed.
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The same shift in the work force can be observed in the Third World. From 1970 to 1980 the number of wage workers in Asia and Africa increased by almost two-thirds, from 72 million to 120 mil- lion. The tendency is toward the steady growth of the working class, both industrial and service workers, and--as Marx predicted--this is happening globally, in every land upon which capitalism descends.
Proletarian Revolution. As capitalism develops so will the prole- tariat, Marx predicted. We have seen that to be true. But he went fur- ther: With the growing misery and polarization, the masses would eventually rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie and put the means of production under public ownership for the benefit of all. The rev- olution would come in the more industrialized capitalist countries that had large, developed working classes.
What struck Marx about the working class was its level of organi- zation and consciousness. Unlike previously oppressed classes, the proletariat, heavily concentrated in urban areas, seemed capable of an unparalleled level of political development. It would not only rebel against its oppressors as had slaves and serfs but would create an egalitarian, nonexploitative social order as never before seen in history. In his day Marx saw an alternative system emerging in the clubs, mutual aid societies, political organizations, and newspapers of a rapidly growing British working class. For the first time, history would be made by the masses in a conscious way, a class for itself. Sporadic rebellion would be replaced by class-conscious revolution. Instead of burning down the manor, the workers would expropriate it and put it to use for the collective benefit of the common people, the ones who built it in the first place.
Certainly Marx s predictions about revolution have not material- ized. There has been no successful proletariat revolution in an advanced capitalist society. As the working class developed so did the capitalist state, whose function has been to protect the capitalist class, with its mechanisms of police suppression and its informa- tional and cultural hegemony.
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Of itself, class struggle does not bring inevitable proletarian vic- tory or even a proletarian uprising. Oppressive social conditions may cry out for revolution, but that does not mean revolution is forth- coming. This point is still not understood by some present-day left- ists. In his later years, Marx himself began to entertain doubts about the inevitability of a victorious workers revolution. So far, the pre-
vailing force has not been revolution but counterrevolution, the dev- ilish destruction wreaked by capitalist states upon popular struggles, at a cost of millions of lives.
Marx also underestimated the extent to which the advanced capi- talist state could use its wealth and power to create a variety of insti- tutions that retard and distract popular consciousness or blunt discontent through reform programs. Contrary to his expectations, successful revolutions occurred in less developed, largely peasant societies such as Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam--though the prole- tariats in those countries participated and sometimes, as in the case of Russia in 1917, even spearheaded the insurgency
Although Marxs predictions about revolution have not material- ized as he envisioned, in recent years there have been impressive instances of working-class militancy in South Korea, South Africa, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, and dozens of other countries, including even the United States. Such mass struggles usu- ally go unreported in the corporate media. In 1984-85, in Great Britain, a bitter, year-long strike resulted in some 10,500 coal miners being arrested, 6,500 injured or battered, and eleven killed. For the British miners locked in that conflict, class struggle was something more than a quaint, obsolete concept.
So in other countries. In Nicaragua, a mass uprising brought down the hated Somoza dictatorship. In Brazil, in 1980-83, as Peter Worsley observes, "the Brazilian working class . . . has played pre- cisely the role assigned to it in 19th century Marxist theory, paralyz- ing Sao Paulo in a succession of enormous mass strikes that began over bread-and-butter issues but which in the end forced the military
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to make major political concessions, notably the restoration of a measure of authentic party-political life " Revolutions are relatively rare occurrences but popular struggle is a widespread and constant phenomenon.
More Wealth, More Poverty
Marx believed that as wealth becomes more concentrated, poverty will become more widespread and the plight of working people ever- more desperate. According to his critics, this prediction has proven wrong. They point out that he wrote during a time of raw industri- alism, an era of robber barons and the fourteen-hour work day. Through persistent struggle, the working class improved its life con- ditions from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Today, mainstream spokespersons portray the United States as a prosperous middle-class society.
Yet one might wonder. During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the national income that went to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population owns almost 50 percent of the nation s wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90 percent of the popula- tion. The gap between Americas rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting ever-greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1 percent saw their earnings grow by over 100 percent, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3 to 10 percent drop in real income. 3
The New York Times (6/20/96) reported that income disparity in 1995 "was wider than it has been since the end of World War II. " The average income for the top 20 percent jumped 44 percent, from $73,754 to $105,945, between 1968 and 1994, while the bottom 20
3 Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity (New York: W. W. Norton: 1994), 134-35.
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percent had a 7 percent increase from $7>202 to $7,762, or only $560 in constant dollars. But these figures understate the problem. The Times story is based on a Census Bureau study that fails to report the income of the very rich. For years the reportable upper limit was $300,000 yearly income. In 1994, the bureau lifted the allowable limit to $1 million. This still leaves out the richest one percent, the hun- dreds of billionaires and thousands of multimillionaires who make many times more than $1 million a year. The really big money is concentrated in a portion of the population so minuscule as to be judged statistically insignificant. But despite their tiny numbers, the amount of wealth they control is enormous and bespeaks an income disparity a thousand times greater than the spread allowed by the Census Bureau figures. Thus, the difference between a multibil- lionare who might make $100 million in any one year and a janitor who makes $8,000 is not 14 to 1 (the usually reported spread between highest and lowest) but over 14,000 to 1. Yet the highest incomes remain unreported and uncounted. In a word, most studies of this
sort give us no idea of how rich the very rich really are. 4
The number living below the poverty level in the United States climbed from 24 million in 1977 to over 35 million by 1995. People were falling more deeply into poverty than in earlier times and find- ing it increasingly difficult to emerge from it. In addition, various
diseases related to hunger and poverty have been on the rise. 5
4 When asked why this procedure was used, a Census Bureau official told my research assistant that the bureaus computers could not handle higher amounts. This excuse seems most improbable, since once the Census Bureau decided to raise the upper limit, it did so without any difficulty. Another reason he gave was confidentiality. Given place coordinates, someone with a very high income could be identified. In addition, high-income respondents understate their income. The interest and dividend earnings they report is only about 50 to 60 percent of actual investment returns. And since their actual numbers are so few, they are likely not to show up in a random sample of the entire nation. By designating the top 20 percent as the "richest " the Census Bureau is lumping in upper-middle profes- sionals and other people who make as little as $70,000 or so, people who are anything but the "richest "
5 For more extensive data, see my essay "Hidden Holocaust, USA," in Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996).
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There has been a general downgrading of the work force. Regular employment is being replaced by contracted labor or temporary help, resulting in lower wages with fewer or no benefits. Many unions have been destroyed or seriously weakened. Protective gov- ernment regulations are being rolled back or left unenforced, and there has been an increase in speedups, injuries, and other workplace abuses.
By the 1990s the growing impoverishment of the middle and working classes, including small independent producers, was becoming evident in various countries. In twenty years, more than half the farmers in industrialized countries, some 22 million, were ruined. Meanwhile, as noted in the previous two chapters, free-mar- ket "reforms" have brought a dramatic increase in poverty, hunger, crime, and ill-health, along with the growth of large fortunes for the very few in the former communist countries.
The Third World has endured deepening impoverishment over the last half century. As foreign investment has increased, so has the misery of the common people who are driven from the land. Those who manage to find employment in the cities are forced to labor for subsistence wages. We might recall how enclosure acts of the late eighteenth century in England fenced off common lands and drove the peasantry into the industrial hell-holes of Manchester and London, transforming them into beggars or half-starved factory workers. Enclosure continues throughout the Third World, displac- ing tens of millions of people.
In countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru, per capita income was lower in 1990 than it had been twenty years earlier. In Mexico, workers earned 50 percent less in 1995 than in 1980. One- third of Latin Americas population, some 130 million, live in utter destitution, while tens of millions more barely manage. In Brazil, the purchasing power of the lower-income brackets declined by 50 per- cent between 1940 and 1990 and at least half the population suffered varying degrees of malnutrition.
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In much of Africa, misery and hunger have assumed horrendous proportions. In Zaire, 80 percent of the people live in absolute penury. In Asia and Africa more than 40 percent of the population linger at the starvation level. Marx predicted that an expanding cap- italism would bring greater wealth for the few and growing misery for the many. That seems to be what is happening--and on a global scale.
A Holistic Science
Repeatedly dismissed as an obsolete "doctrine," Marxism retains a compelling contemporary quality, for it is less a body of fixed dicta and more a method of looking beyond immediate appearances to see the inner qualities and moving forces that shape social relations and much of history itself. As Marx noted: "All science would be super- fluous if outward appearances and the essence of things directly coincided. " Indeed, perhaps the reason so much of modern social science seems superfluous is because it settles for the tedious tracing of outward appearances.
To understand capitalism, one first has to strip away the appear- ances presented by its ideology. Unlike most bourgeois theorists, Marx realized that what capitalism claims to be and what it actually is are two different things. What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumula- tion. Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capi- tal. The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmen- tal costs.
An essential point of Marxist analysis is that the social structure and class order prefigure our behavior in many ways. Capitalism moves into every area of work and community, harnessing all of social life to its pursuit of profit. It converts nature, labor, science,
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art, music, and medicine into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass cul- ture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers.
Marxists understand that a class society is not just a divided soci- ety but one ruled by class power, with the state playing the crucial role in maintaining the existing class structure. Marxism might be considered a "holistic" science in that it recognizes the links between various components of the social system. Capitalism is not just an economic system but a political and cultural one as well, an entire social order. When we study any part of that order, be it the news or entertainment media, criminal justice, Congress, defense spending, overseas military intervention, intelligence agencies, campaign finance, science and technology, education, medical care, taxation, transportation, housing, or whatever, we will see how the particular part reflects the nature of the whole. Its unique dynamic often buttresses and is shaped by the larger social system -- espe- cially the systems overriding need to maintain the prerogatives of the corporate class.
In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensi- bly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social rela- tions. Consider a specific phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with each other. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the fore, racism becomes not less but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial are- nas of struggle at the very same time.
Marxists further maintain that racism involves not just personal attitude but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by
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well-financed reactionary forces seeking to divide the working pop- ulace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves.
Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depress- ing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super-exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By "rational" I mean purpo- sive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.
Lacking a holistic approach to society, conventional social science tends to compartmentalize social experience. So we are asked to ponder whether this or that phenomenon is cultural or economic or psychological, when usually it is a blend of all these things. Thus, an automobile is unmistakably an economic artifact but it also has a cultural and psychological component, and even an aesthetic dimen- sion. We need a greater sense of how analytically distinct phenomena are often empirically interrelated and may actually gather strength and definition from each other.
Marxists do not accept the prevalent view of institutions as just "being there" with all the natural innocence of mountains--espe- cially the more articulated formal institutions such as the church, army, police, military, university, media, medicine, and the like. Institutions are heavily shaped by class interests and class power. Far from being neutral and independent bastions, the major institutions of society are tied to the big business class. Corporate representatives exercise direct decision-making power through control of governing boards and directorships. Business elites usually control the budgets and the very property of various institutions, a control inscribed into law through corporate charters and enforced by the police powers of the state. Their power extends to the managers picked, the policies set, and the performances of employees.
If conventional social science has any one dedication, it is to ignore
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the linkages between social action and the systemic demands of capi- talism, avoiding any view of power in its class dimensions, and any view of class as a power relationship. For conventional researchers, power is seen as fragmented and fluid, and class is nothing more than an occupational or income category to be correlated with voting habits, consumer styles or whatever, and not as a relationship between those who own and those who labor for those who own.
In the Marxist view there can be no such thing as a class as such, a social entity unto itself. There can be no lords without serfs, no masters without slaves, no capitalists without workers. More than just a sociological category, class is a relationship to the means of production and to social and state power. This idea, so fundamental to an understanding of public policy, is avoided by conventional social scientists who prefer to concentrate on everything else but class power realities. 6
It is remarkable, for instance, that some political scientists have studied the presidency and Congress for decades without uttering a word about capitalism, without so much as a sidelong glance at how the imperatives of a capitalist politico-economic order play such a crucial role in prefiguring the political agenda. Social science is clut- tered with "community power studies" that treat communities and issues as isolated autonomous entities. Such investigations are usu- ally limited to the immediate interplay of policy actors, with little said about how issues link up to a larger range of social interests.
Conservative ideological preconceptions regularly influence the research strategies of most social scientists and policy analysts. In political science, for instance:
(1) The relationships between industrial capitalist nations and Third World nations are described as (a) "dependency" and "inter- dependency" and as fostering a mutually beneficial development, rather than (b) an imperialism that exploits the land, labor, and
6 See the discussion on class in the following chapter.
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resources of weaker nations for the benefit of the favored classes in both the industrial and less-developed worlds.
(2) The United States and other "democratic capitalist" societies are said to be held together by (a) common values that reflect the com- mon interest, not by (b) class power and domination.
(3) The fragmentation of power in the political process is suppos- edly indicative of (a) a fluidity and democratization of interest- group pluralism, rather than (b) the pocketing and structuring of power in unaccountable and undemocratic ways.
(4) The mass propagation of conventional political beliefs is described as (a) political "socialization" and "education for citizen- ship," and is treated as a desirable civic process, rather than (b) an indoctrination that distorts the information flow and warps the pub- lic s critical perceptions.
In each of these instances, mainstream academics offer version a not as a research finding but as an a priori assumption that requires no critical analysis, upon which research is then predicated. At the same time they disregard the evidence and research that supports version b.
By ignoring the dominant class conditions that exercise such an influence over social behavior, conventional social science can settle on surface factualness, trying to explain immediate actions in exclu- sively immediate terms. Such an approach places a high priority on epiphenomenal and idiosyncratic explanations, the peculiarities of specific personalities and situations. What is habitually overlooked in such research (and in our news reports, our daily observations, and sometimes even our political struggles) is the way seemingly remote forces may prefigure our experiences.
Learning to Ask Why
When we think without Marxs perspective, that is, without con- sidering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news but few are
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explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations--propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests--and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity.
Thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic forces that create them and we learn to truncate our own critical thinking. Imagine if we attempted something different; for example, if we tried to explain that wealth and poverty exist together not in accidental juxtaposition, but because wealth causes poverty, an inevitable outcome of economic exploitation both at home and abroad. How could such an analysis gain any exposure in the capi- talist media or in mainstream political life?
Suppose we started with a particular story about how child labor in Indonesia is contracted by multinational corporations at near- starvation wage levels. This information probably would not be car- ried in rightwing publications, but in 1996 it did appear--after decades of effort by some activists--in the centrist mainstream press. What if we then crossed a line and said that these exploitative employer-employee relations were backed by the full might of the Indonesian military government. Fewer media would carry this story but it still might get mentioned in an inside page of the New York Times or Washington Post.
Then suppose we crossed another line and said that these repres- sive arrangements would not prevail were it not for generous mili- tary aid from the United States, and that for almost thirty years the homicidal Indonesian military has been financed, armed, advised, and trained by the U. S. national security state. Such a story would be even more unlikely to appear in the liberal press but it is still issue- specific and safely without an overall class analysis, so it might well
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make its way into left-liberal opinion publications like the Nation and the Progressive.
Now suppose we pointed out that the conditions found in Indonesia--the heartless economic exploitation, brutal military repression, and lavish U. S. support--exist in scores of other coun- tries. Suppose we then crossed that most serious line of all and instead of just deploring this fact we also asked why successive U. S. administrations involve themselves in such unsavory pursuits throughout the world. And what if then we tried to explain that the whole phenomenon is consistent with the U. S. dedication to making the world safe for the free market and the giant multinational cor- porations, and that the intended goals are (a) to maximize opportu- nities to accumulate wealth by depressing the wage levels of workers throughout the world and preventing them from organizing on behalf of their own interests, and (b) to protect the overall global sys- tem of free-market capital accumulation.
Then what if, from all this, we concluded that U. S. foreign policy is neither timid, as the conservatives say, nor foolish, as the liberals say, but is remarkably successful in rolling back just about all gov- ernments and social movements that attempt to serve popular needs rather than private corporate greed.
Such an analysis, hurriedly sketched here, would take some effort to lay out and would amount to a Marxist critique--a correct cri- tique--of capitalist imperialism. Though Marxists are not the only ones that might arrive at it, it almost certainly would not be pub- lished anywhere except in a Marxist publication. We crossed too many lines. Because we tried to explain the particular situation (child labor) in terms of a larger set of social relations (corporate class power), our presentation would be rejected out of hand as "ide- ological. " The perceptual taboos imposed by the dominant powers teach people to avoid thinking critically about such powers. In con- trast, Marxism gets us into the habit of asking why, of seeing the link- age between political events and class power.
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A common method of devaluing Marxism is to misrepresent what it actually says and then attack the misrepresentation. This happens easily enough since most of the anti-Marxist critics and their audi- ences have only a passing familiarity with Marxist literature and rely instead on their own caricatured notions. Thus, the Roman Catholic Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism rejects the claim that "struc- tural [read, class] revolution can entirely cure a disease that is man himself" nor can it provide "the solution of all human suffering. " But who makes such a claim? There is no denying that revolution does not entirely cure all human suffering. But why is that assertion used as a refutation of Marxism? Most Marxists are neither chiliastic nor Utopian. They dream not of a perfect society but of a better, more just life. They make no claim to eliminating all suffering, and recognize that even in the best of societies there are the inevitable assaults of misfortune, mortality, and other vulnerabilities of life. And certainly in any society there are some people who, for whatever reason, are given to wrongful deeds and self-serving corruptions. The highly imperfect nature of human beings should make us all the more deter- mined not to see power and wealth accumulating in the hands of an unaccountable few, which is the central dedication of capitalism.
Capitalism and its various institutions affect the most personal dimensions of everyday life in ways not readily evident. A Marxist approach helps us to see connections to which we were previously blind, to relate effects to causes, and to replace the arbitrary and the mysterious with the regular and the necessary. A Marxist perspective helps us to see injustice as rooted in systemic causes that go beyond individual choice, and to view crucial developments not as neutral happenings but as the intended consequences of class power and interest. Marxism also shows how even unintended consequences can be utilized by those with superior resources to service their interests.
Is Marx still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distort the news in a mostly mainstream direction; why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while
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money continues to accumulate in the hands of relatively few; why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere; why U. S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world; why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recessions, underemployment, and neglect of social needs; and why many political officeholders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest. 7
Some Marxist theorists have so ascended into the numbing alti- tudes of abstract cogitation that they seldom touch political realities here on earth. They spend their time talking to each other in self-ref- erential code, a scholastic ritual that Doug Dowd described as "How many Marxists can dance on the head of a surplus value. " Fortunately there are others who not only tell us about Marxist the- ory but demonstrate its utility by applying it to political actualities. They know how to draw connections between immediate experience and the larger structural forces that shape that experience. They cross the forbidden line and talk about class power.
This is why, for all the misrepresentation and suppression, Marxist scholarship survives. While not having all the answers, it does have a superior explanatory power, telling us something about reality that bourgeois scholarship refuses to do. Marxism offers the kind of subversive truths that cause fear and trembling among the high and mighty, those who live atop a mountain of lies.
7 To further pursue these questions, the reader is invited to read several of my books: Democracy for the Few, 6th edition, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995); Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995); and Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996).
? CHAPTER 9
ANYTHING BUT CLASS: AVOIDING THE C-WORD
"Class" is a concept that is strenuously avoided by both main- stream writers and many on the Left. When certain words are elimi- nated from public discourse, so are certain thoughts. Dissident ideas become all the more difficult to express when there are no words to express them. "Class" is usually dismissed as an outworn Marxist notion with no relevance to contemporary society. It is a five-letter word that is treated like a dirty four-letter one.
With the C-word out of the way, it is then easy to dispose of other politically unacceptable concepts such as class privilege, class power, class exploitation, class interest, and class struggle. These too are judged no longer relevant, if ever they were, in a society that sup- posedly consists of the fluid pluralistic interplay of diverse groups.
The Class Denial of Class
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously
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differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impres- sive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit.
At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class," "upper class," or "moneyed class. " And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class. "
The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are them- selves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record--to some limited degree. 1 While it would seem a sim- ple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory. "
The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes," for then one is talk- ing about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the sooth- ing adjective "middle. " Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt con- cern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is suppos-
1 For a more detailed treatment of ruling-class resources and influences>> see my Democracyfor the Few, 6th edition (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995).
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edly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of soci- ety By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conve- niently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actu- ality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimiza- tion: the "underclass. " References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.
Class reality is obscured by an ideology whose tenets might be summarized and rebutted as follows:
Credo: There are no real class divisions in this society. Save for some rich and poor, almost all of us are middle class.
Response: Wealth is enormously concentrated in the hands of rel- atively few in this country, while tens of millions work for poverty- level wages, when work is to be had. The gap between rich and poor has always been great and has been growing since the late 1970s. Those in the middle also have been enduring increasing economic injustice and insecurity.
Credo: Our social institutions and culture are autonomous enti- ties in a pluralistic society, largely free of the influences of wealth and class power. To think otherwise is to entertain conspiracy theories.
Response: Great concentrations of wealth exercise an influence in all aspects of life, often a dominating one. Our social and cultural institutions are run by boards of directors (or trustees or regents) drawn largely from interlocking, nonelective, self-selecting corpo- rate elites. They and their faithful hirelings occupy most of the com- mand positions of the executive state and other policymaking bodies, and manifest a keen awareness of their class interests when
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shaping domestic and international policies. This includes such policies as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), designed to circumvent whatever democratic sovereignty exists within nations. 2
Credo: The differences between rich and poor are a natural given, not causally linked. Individual human behavior, not class, deter- mines human performance and life chances. Existing social arrange- ments are a natural reflection of largely innate human proclivities.
Response: All conservative ideologies justify existing inequities as the natural order of things, inevitable outcomes of human nature. If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies, and other special considera- tions--at our expense? Their "naturally superior talents" include unprincipled and illegal subterfuges such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider trading, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforce- ment of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful prod- ucts, and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the cor- porate business system.
The ABC Theorists
Even among persons normally identified as progressive, one finds a reluctance to deal with the reality of capitalist class power. Sometimes the dismissal of the C-word is quite categorical. At a meeting in New York in 1986 I heard the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz comment, "When I hear the word 'class' I just yawn. " For Aronowitz, class is a concept of diminishing importance used by
2 For a discussion of GATT see my Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995).
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those he repeatedly referred to as "orthodox Marxists. "3
Another left academic, Ronald Aronson, in a book entitled After Marxism, claims--in the face of all recent evidence--that classes in capitalist society have become "less polarized" and class exploitation is not an urgent issue nowadays because labor unions "have achieved power to protect their members and affect social policy. " This at a time when many unions are being destroyed, workers are being downgraded to the status of contract laborers, and the income gap is
wider than in decades.
Many who pretend to be on the Left are so rabidly anti-Marxist as
to seize upon any conceivable notion except class power to explain what is happening in the world. They are the Anything-But-Class (ABC) theorists who, while not allied with conservatives on most
3 Aronowitz and some other "left" academics do battle against Marxism by producing hypertheorized exegeses in a field called "cultural studies" That their often impenetrable writings seldom connect to the real world was demonstrated in 1996 by physicist Alan Sokal, himself a leftist, who wrote a cultural studies parody and submitted it to Aronowitz's Social Text, a journal devoted to articles that specialize in bloated verbiage, pedantic pretensions, and academic one- upmanship. Sokal's piece was laden with obscure but trendy jargon and footnoted references to the likes of Jacques Derrida and Aronowitz himself. It purported to be an "epistemic exposition" of "recent developments in quantum gravity" and "the space-time manifold" and "foundational conceptual categories of prior science" that have "become problematized and relativized" with "profound implications for the content of a future post-modern and liberatory science " Various Social Text editors read and accepted the piece as a serious contribution. After they published it, Sokal revealed that it was little more than fabricated gibberish that "wasn't obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic " In effect, he demonstrated that the journal s editors were themselves so profoundly immersed in pretentiously inflated discourse as to be unable to distinguish between a genuine intellectual effort and a silly parody. Aronowitz responded
by calling Sokal "ill-read and half-educated" (New York Times, 5/18/96).
One is reminded of Robert McChesney's comment: "At some universities the very term cultural studies has become an ongoing punchline to a bad joke. It signifies half-assed research, self-congratulation, and farcical pretension. At its worst, the proponents of this newfangled cultural studies are unable to defend their work, so they no longer try, merely claiming that their critics are hung up on outmoded notions like evidence, logic, science, and rationality" (Monthly Review, 3/96). In my opinion, one of the main effects of cultural studies is to draw attention away from the vital realities of class power, the "outmoded" things that cause Aronowitz and his associates to yawn.
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political issues, do their part in stunting class consciousness. 4
The "left" ABC theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that? Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most U. S. writers and commen- tators have yet to discover the subject. While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who domi- nate intellectual discourse in this country--yet another hallucina-
tion they hold in common with conservatives. 3
In their endless search for conceptual schema that might mute
Marxism s class analysis, "left" ABC theorists have twaddled for years over a false dichotomization between early Marx (culturalistic, humanistic, good) and later Marx (dogmatic, economistic, bad). 6 As
4 For prime examples, try the bloated, pretentious prose of such left anticommunist theorists as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, both of whom are treated reverently by their counterparts in this country. One recent fad of the "left" ABC intellectuals is "post-modernism," which argues that the principles of rationality and evidence of modern times no longer apply; longstanding ideologies have lost their relevance as has most of political economy and history; and one cannot hope to develop a reliable critique of class and institutional forces. While claiming to search for new "meanings," post-modernism resembles the same old anti-class theories, both right and left. For a discussion and critique, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (eds. ), In Defense of History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).
* Some publications that claim to be on the Left, such as Dissent, New Republic, New Politics, Telos, In These Times, and Democratic Left can often be as unyielding as any conservative rag in their anticommunism, anti-Marxism, and of course anti-Sovietism.
b One of those who pretends to be on the Left is John Judis, whose impressive illiteracy in regard to Marxism does not prevent him from distinguishing between "humanistic" Marxists and Marxists who are "simple-minded economic determi- nists" (In These Times, 9/23/81 ). According to Judis, the latter fail to ascribe any importance to cultural conditions and political structures. I know of no Marxists who fit that description. I, for one, treat cultural and political institutions in
much detail in various books of mine--but culture as anchored in an overall system of corporate ownership and control; see my Power and the Powerless (New York: St. Martins Press. 1978); Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media,
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Marxist scholar Berteli Oilman notes, this artificial counterpoising transforms a relatively minor development in Marx s work into a chasm between two ways of thinking that have little in common/
Some ABC theorists labored hard to promote the writings of the late Italian Communist party leader Antonio Gramsci as a source of cultural theory to counteract a Marxist class analysis. (See, for instance, publications like Paul Piccone's Telos during the 1970s and early 1980s. ) Gramsci, they said, rejected the "economistic" views of Marx and Lenin and did not treat class conflict as a central concept, preferring to develop a more "nuanced analysis" based on cultural hegemony. So Gramsci was made into "the Marxist whos safe to bring home to Mother," as the historian T. J. Jackson put it. And as Christopher Phelps added:
Gramsci has become safe, tame, denatured--a wisp of his revolu- tionary self. Academics seeking to justify their retreat into highly abstruse theories have created fanciful illusions about their 'counter- hegemonic' activity. They have created a mythical Gramsci who holds views he never did, including an opposition to revolutionary socialist organization of the sort that he, following upon Lenin, held indis- pensable" (Monthly Review, 11/95).