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Colonized by Corporations
by
Chris Hedges
In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The
Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer
notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their
hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who
masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within
their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for
what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the
continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the
political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power,
Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the
conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political
disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The
government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone
toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he
writes.
Gamer and many others who study
the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our
corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire,
colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to
the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors.
They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich
themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom
the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the
wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied
job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged
into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The
school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior
education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as
criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past
weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment
benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward
survival. It is an old, old game.
A change of power does not
require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic
majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing
progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the
political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the
establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect
resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the
ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves
as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way
we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the
futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure
itself.
The danger the corporate state
faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the
Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often
become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé
intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a
calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters,
teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients
and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they
mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the
oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.
This is why the Occupy movement
frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the
gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is
especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much
justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to
rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical
they become.
The response of a dying
regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to employ increasing levels of
force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness,
foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion
from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant
ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual
death.
In every revolutionary movement I
covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged
from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged,
educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations.
They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been.
They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of
oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that
makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States
threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase.
They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do
not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations
industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in
economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power,
are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall
Street.
This is what made Malcolm X so
threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin
Luther King’s fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black
people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view.
Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate
state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we
will be nothing more than useful idiots.
“This is an era of hypocrisy,”
Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free,
and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks
want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool
you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you
believe you’re my brother.”
Those within a demoralized ruling
elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the
system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become
cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no
longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and
exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions,
as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan
Chase, the meltdown ofChesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and
Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is
what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his
own nobility by revoking patents of nobilityand reselling them. It is what most
corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no
longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the
rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets
that are the public face of the corporate state.
“Ideas that have outlived their
day may hobble about the world for years,” Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is
hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete
possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.”
This loss of faith means that
when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and
inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot
soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.
Revolutions take time. The
American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did
not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a
dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian
Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who
carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early
stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the
Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only
demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited
authentic anarchism.
Radical violent groups cling like
parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian
Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese
Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by
the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the
movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the
majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe
groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through
hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The
primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir
Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror,
primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of
the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.
The power of the Occupy movement
is that it expresses the widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep
desire for justice and fairness that is essential to all successful
revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it
will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this is less
because of the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of
power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit, routine
and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed
experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in
dissecting what is happening within these movements. They view reality through
the lens of their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.
Dying regimes are chipped away
slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and daily formalities of the old
system are difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is
increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an
old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary
movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to measure
progress.
“Sometimes people hold a core
belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.” “When
they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely
uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to
protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything
that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
The end of these regimes comes
when old beliefs die and the organs of security, especially the police and
military, abandon the elites and join the revolutionaries. This is true in
every successful revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the
repressive apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become
demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when
they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And
no one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict the
moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies
comprehension. They are living entities.
The defection of the security
apparatus is often done with little or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern
Europe in 1989 and as was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At
other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime
triggers a violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and
officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise
the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution
led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao
conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests,
strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience.
The object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite
what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid
affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote,
“unwittingly build new ones.” And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard
to speak of victors and losers.
A revolution has been unleashed
across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is
where we should direct all our energy and commitment. If we do not topple the corporate elites the
ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it.
The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going
nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response
of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition
of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that
overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands
or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or
energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling
station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register
your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is
where the question of real power is being decided.
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