The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America. We have a national interest. We're working together. There's us nice workers, the firms in which we work, the media that labor to tell us the truth about the things that matter to us, the government that works for us. We pick them. They're our servants. And that's all there is in the world, no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it.
DB: So then issues like class oppression and class warfare, equally exotic, occur only in obscure books and on Mars?
Or in the business press, where it's written about all the time, and the business literature, or in internal government documents. It exists there because they have to worry about it.
DB: You use the term "elite." Samir Amin says it confers too much dignity upon them. He prefers "ruling class." Incidentally, a more recent invention is "the ruling crass."
The only reason I don't use the word "class" is that the terminology of political discourse is so debased it's hard to find any words at all. That's part of the point, to make it impossible to talk. For one thing, "class" has various associations. As soon as you say the word "class," everybody falls down dead. There's some Marxist raving again. But the other thing is that to do a really serious class analysis, you can't just talk about the ruling class. Are the professors at Harvard part of the ruling class? Are the editors of the New York Times part of the ruling class? Are the bureaucrats in the State Department? There are differentiations, a lot of different categories of people. So you can talk vaguely about the establishment or the elites or the people in the dominant sectors. But you can't get away from the fact that there are sharp differences in power which in fact are ultimately rooted in the economic system. You can talk about the masters, if you like. It's Adam Smith's word, you might as well go back to that. They are the masters, and they follow what he called their "vile maxim," namely "all for ourselves and nothing for other people." That's a good first approximation to it, since Adam Smith is now in fashion.
DB: You say that class transcends race, essentially.
In an important sense, I think it does. For example, the United States could become a color-free society. It's possible. I don't think it's going to happen, but it's perfectly possible that it would happen, and it wouldn't change the political economy, hardly at all. Just as you could remove the "glass ceiling" for women and that wouldn't change the political economy at all. That's one of the reasons why you quite commonly find the business sector reasonably willing, often happy to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism. It basically doesn't matter that much. You lose a little white male privilege, but that's not all that important. On the other hand, basic changes in the core institutions would be bitterly resisted, if they ever became thinkable.
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DB: And you can pay the women less.
You can pay them the same amount. Take England. They just went through ten pleasant years with the Iron Lady running things. Even worse than Reaganism.
DB: So in this pyramid of control and domination, where there's class and race and gender bias, sexism, lingering in the shadows, certainly in the liberal democracies, is coercion, force.
That comes from the fact that objective power is concentrated. Objective power lies in various places: in patriarchy, in race. Crucially it lies in ownership. It's very much worth overcoming the other forms of oppression. For people's lives, they may be much worse than the class oppression. When a kid was lynched in the South, that was worse than being paid low wages. So when we talk about what's at the core of the system of oppression and what isn't, that can't be spelled out in terms of suffering. Suffering is an independent dimension, and you want to overcome suffering.
On the other hand, if you think about the way the society works in general, it works pretty much the way the founding fathers said. The society should be governed by those who own it, and they intend to follow Adam Smith's vile maxim. That's at the core of things. Lots of other things can change and that can remain and we will have pretty much the same forms of domination.
DB: You've said the real drama since 1776 has been the "relentless attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many." I want to ask you about the "restless many." Do they hold any cards?
Sure. They've won a lot of victories. The country's a lot more free than it was two hundred years ago. For one thing, we don't have slaves. That's a big change. You recall that Thomas Jefferson's goal, at the very left-liberal end, was to create a country without "blot or mixture," meaning no red Indians, no black people, good white, Anglo-Saxons. That's what the liberals wanted. They didn't succeed. They did pretty much get rid of the native population. But they couldn't get rid of the black population and they've had to incorporate them in some fashion into the society over time. Women finally received the franchise one hundred and fifty years after the Revolution. The right of freedom of speech was vastly extended. Workers finally won some rights in the 1930s, about fifty years after they did in Europe, after a very bloody struggle. They've been losing them ever since, but they won them to some extent. In many ways large parts of the general population were integrated into the system of relative prosperity, relative freedom, almost always as a result of popular struggle. The general population has lots of cards. That's something that David Hume pointed out a couple of centuries ago as a kind of paradox of government. In his work on political theory, he asks why the population submits to the rulers, since force is in the hands of the governed. Therefore, ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion. He says this is true of the most despotic societies and the most free. There is a constant battle between those who refuse to accept it and those who are trying to force them to accept it.
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DB: How to break from the system of indoctrination and propaganda? You've said that it's nearly impossible for individuals to do anything, that's it's much easier and better to act collectively. What prevents people from getting associated?
There's a big investment involved. Anybody lives within a cultural and social framework which has certain values and certain opportunities. It assigns cost to various kinds of action and benefits to others. You just live in that. You can't help it. We live in one that assigns benefits to efforts to achieve individual gain. Any individual can ask himself or herself, let's say I'm the father or mother of a family, what do I do with my time? I've got twenty four hours a day. If I've got children to take care of, a future to worry about, what do I do? One thing you can do is try to play up to the boss and see if you can get a dollar more an hour, or maybe kick somebody in the face when you walk past them. If not do it directly, do it indirectly, by the mechanisms that are set up for you within a capitalist society. That's one way. The other way you can do it is by spending your evenings going around trying to organize other people who will then spend their evenings at meetings, go out on a picket line, carry out a long struggle in which they'll be beaten up by the police and lose their jobs. Maybe they'll finally get enough people together so they'll ultimately achieve a gain, which may or may not be greater than the gain that you tried to achieve by following the individualist course. People have to make those choices. They make them within a framework of existing structures. Within the framework of existing structures, although it harms everyone in the long run, the choices for a particular individual are to maximize personal gain. In game theory it's called "prisoner's dilemma." You can set up things called "games," interactions, in which each participant will gain more if they work together, but you only gain if the other person works with you. If the other person is trying to maximize his or her own gain, you lose.
Let me take a simple case, driving to work. It would take me longer to take public transportation than to drive to work. As long as everybody else is driving, that's the way it's going to be. If we all took the subway and put the money into that instead of into roads, we'd all get there faster by the subway. But we all have to do it. It's only if we all do something a different way that we'll all benefit a lot more. The costs to you, to an individual, of working to try to create the possibilities to do things together can be severe. It's only if lots of people begin to do it, and do it seriously, that you get real benefits.
The same was true of every popular movement that ever existed. Suppose you were a twenty-year-old black kid in Atlanta in 1960, at Spelman College. You had two choices. One is: I'll try to get a job in a business somewhere. Maybe somebody will be willing to pick a black manager. I'll be properly humble and bow and scrape. Maybe I'll live in a middle-class home. That's one path. The other path was to join SNCC, in which case you might get killed. You were certainly going to get beaten and defamed. It would be a very tough life for a long time. Maybe in the long term you'll finally be able to create enough popular support that people like you and your family and your children will live better. It was hard to make that second choice, given the alternatives available. Fortunately, a lot of young people did, and it's a better world because of it. But society is very much structured to try to drive you toward the individualist alternative.
DB: You've noted polls that indicate that alienation from institutions keeps increasing. You've observed that the population is going in one way, toward Orlando, and the policy is going toward Santa Monica, in a completely different direction. Eighty-three percent regard the entire economic system as "inherently unfair." But it doesn't translate into anything.
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It can only translate into anything if people do something about it. That's true whether you're talking about general things, like the inherent unfairness of the economic system, which requires revolutionary change, or about small things. Take, say, health insurance. Even though in public very few articulate voices call for what's called a "Canadian style" system, the kind of system that they have more or less everywhere in the world, an efficient, nationally organized public health system that guarantees health services for everyone and if it were serious, as Canada isn't enough, would also do preventive care. But polls have shown for years that most of the population are in favor of it anyway, even though they've never heard anybody advocate it. Does it matter? No. There will be some kind of insurance company based, "managed" health care system which is designed to ensure that the insurance companies and the health corporations that they run will make plenty of money. The only way we could get what most of the population wants with regard to health care is either by a large-scale popular movement, which would mean moving towards democracy, and nobody in power is going to want that, or else if the business community decides that it's good for them. Which they might. Because this highly bureaucratized, extremely inefficient system designed for the benefit of one sector of the private enterprise system happens to harm other sectors. Auto companies pay more in health benefits here than they would across the border. They notice that. They may press for a more efficient system that breaks away from the extreme inefficiencies and irrationalities of the capitalist based system.
DB: Edward Herman wrote a book about elections in U.S. client states called Demonstration Elections. That might describe what happens in the United States. What functions do elections serve here?
Today is the 21st of January. As anybody who bothered watching television for the last two or three days knows, it's supposed to make people feel good about themselves and that something wonderful is happening. We have a marvelous country. There's hope. There's a young man there with a pretty wife. They're baby boomers. Now everything's going to be great. So it's a way of overcoming the growing alienation, at least for a short period, without doing anything. It's like Roman circuses. I don't want to suggest it's of zero significance. There is some significance. How much, you can debate. But the hoopla about it, the big celebrations, is simply at the level of Roman circuses. You have to do something for the population.
DB: Talking about bread and circuses, the Romans would be in awe. Did you hear about the Elvis stamp? There were two choices. One showed the young Elvis in his prime, and the other a more mature Elvis. The Post Office ran an expensive publicity campaign and millions of people voted. They picked the younger Elvis and lined up in the middle of the night to buy the first stamps. Bread and circuses. Give them something really meaningful to vote on.
Right. And get people excited about that and they won't worry too much about the fact that the economy is inherently unfair or their real wages are declining or their children are not going to live as well as they do. Let them worry about Elvis.
DB: You've called the function of the President of the United States the "CEO of corporate America."
If you want to know how they feel about Bill Clinton, look at the stock market. It's doing rather nicely.
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DB: Business right after the election was very positive.
There was an article yesterday in the London Financial Times, the major international business journal, pointing out that the stock market was looking at Clinton and thinking he was doing the right things. Investors are happy.
DB: It's only in America that a billionaire can run for President and pose as a populist, as Ross Perot did. What was your take on his candidacy and the whole Perot phenomenon?
The most interesting period, I thought, was when he just appeared, at the very beginning. He could have come from Mars, as far as anyone knew. Nobody knew what his program was. He probably didn't have one. He had nothing to say. He was just this guy who said, Look, I made a lot of money and I've got big ears and a big smile. Within about two weeks, he was running even with the two major candidates. I think what that indicates is pretty clear. It means the population is so desperate that if somebody lands from Mars, they'll try him.
DB: Calls for a third party assume that we have a two-party system. Is that off base?
It's a question of definition. We certainly have two candidate-producing organizations. We don't have two parties that people participate in. We don't have two parties with different interests. They basically reflect one or another faction of the part of society that you're not allowed to mention in Mandate for Change, namely the owners and investors and managers. They both represent their interests. But they have different takes on it. And they also have different popular constituencies. That in fact has some effect. The popular constituencies have to be offered some crumbs, just to keep the system of bureaucratic and other power functioning. The main structure of decision making, which has to do with profit, with international affairs, with strategic issues, the popular constituency is allowed no role in that, no matter who's in office. But it can be given other things. For example, the Republicans tend to be somewhat more openly the party of the business classes and the rich. They hide it less than the Democrats. Therefore it's harder for them to appeal to the general public. Their appeal quite often is in terms of jingoism, violence, religious fundamentalism, and the so-called social issues. They've got to give some crumbs to their constituencies, so they give them those things. That's why you have the Supreme Court appointments that you've had in the last ten years. The big attack on civil rights, the racism, the attacks on welfare mothers. That's a gift to that sector of the population. It doesn't affect profits. It doesn't affect power, so you can give it to them. The Democrats have tried to appeal to a different constituency. They pretend to be the party of the people. So they have to do something for the working people, women, minorities. That means that they can be expected to get the crumbs, like the Supreme Court appointments. And when I say "crumbs," I don't mean to demean it. Those are things that can have an enormous effect on individual life. They just don't affect the structure of the political economy.
DB: "The phenomenal concentration of property and business under the control of monopolies known as 'corporations' is changing the commercial aspect of the world and also changing the social relations. At no time in history has combination succeeded combination in greater and greater aggregations like the present. The little fellow is no longer in it." August 31, 1895. J.A. Whalen's first editorial in the Appeal to Reason.
The Appeal to Reason was an interesting left journal which about ten years after that appeared had about three-quarters of a million subscribers. One of the major journals in the country. It was part of a flourishing and lively labor press, all of which has disappeared, a big change over the last century. The comment is correct. Of course it has increased. The difference is that increasingly, especially in the last twenty years, the corporations have become much more international, with effects that we've discussed.
DB: Reagan comes to power in 1981 and the debt is one trillion dollars. Today it's four trillion dollars, and that's projected to grow by fifty percent over the next six years. Who owns the debt? Who's going to pay it?
Debt just means people who buy government bonds and securities. They own the debt. Mostly the rich, naturally, at home and abroad. The people who pay it are taxpayers. The debt is just another mechanism for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, like most social policy. Of course, there's another form of payment. The debt takes away from the possibility of social spending that would benefit the general population. Incidentally, the debt itself, just the numbers, is not a huge problem. We've had bigger debts than that, not in numbers, but relative to GNP, in the past. What the debt is exactly is a bit of a statistical artifact. You can make it different things depending on how you count.
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But whatever it is, it's not something that couldn't be dealt with. The question is, what was done with the borrowing? If the borrowing in the last ten years had been used for constructive purposes, say, for investment or infrastructure, we'd be quite well off. The fact is that the borrowing was used for enrichment of the rich, for consumption, which meant lots of imports, which built up the trade deficit; and for financial manipulation and speculation, which are very harmful to the economy.
DB: Given the economic situation, it would seem to be a propitious moment for the left, the progressive movement, to come forward with some concrete proposals. People are not unaware of what's going on: high rents, skyrocketing college tuition and medical costs, etc. Yet the left, if I can call it that, when not bogged down in internecine warfare, is seemingly in a reactive mode only. It's not proactive.
What people call the "left," the peace and justice movements, whatever they are, in terms of numbers, I think they've expanded a lot over the years. On particular issues they focus on them and achieve things. They tend to be very localized. There's very little in the way of broader integration, of institutional structure. They can't coalesce around unions because the unions are essentially gone. To the extent that there's any structure it's usually something like the church. There is virtually no functioning left intelligentsia. Nobody's talking much about what should be done or is even available to give talks. So you have a very large number of people, an enormous constituency, with a local focus, both regionally and in terms of issues, and nothing much in the sense of a general vision or picture. That's the result of the success of the class warfare of the last decades in destroying, breaking up popular organizations and isolating people.
Also I should say that the policy issues that have to be faced are quite deep. It's always nice to have reforms. It would be nice to have more money for starving children. You can think of lots of reforms that should be carried out. But there are some objective problems which you and I would have to face if we ran the country. One objective problem, which was kindly pointed out to the Clinton administration by the Wall Street Journal in a front page article the other day is that if they get any funny ideas about taking some of their own rhetoric seriously -- granted, that's not very likely, but just in case anybody has some funny ideas -- spending money for social spending, the United States is so deeply in hock to the international financial community because of the debt and the sale of Treasury bonds, that they have a lock on U.S. policy. The lock is very simple. If something happens here, say, increasing workers' salaries, that the bondholders don't like, that's going to cut down their short-term profit, they'll just start withdrawing from the U.S. bond market, which will drive interest rates up, which will drive the economy down. They point out that Clinton's twenty-billion-dollar spending program can be turned into a twenty-billion-dollar additional cost to the government, to the debt, just by slight changes in the purchase and sale of bonds, with their automatic effects on increasing interest rates, etc. So social policy, even in a country as rich and powerful as the United States, which is the richest and most powerful of them all, is mortgaged to the international wealthy sectors here and abroad. Those are issues that have to be dealt with.
To deal with those issues means to face problems of revolutionary change. There's apparently a debate going on within the Clinton administration over whether there should be efforts to protect American workers no matter who owns an enterprise, or U.S.-based enterprises. All those debates are taking place within a framework of assumptions: the investors have the right to decide what happens. So we have to make things as attractive as possible to the investors. As long as the investors have the right to decide what happens, nothing much else is going to change. It's like saying in a totalitarian state, shall we change from proportional representation to some other kind in the state-run parliament. Maybe it will make a little change, but it's not going to matter much. Until you get to the source of power, which ultimately is investment decisions, other changes are cosmetic and can only take place in a limited way. If they go too far the investors will just make other decisions, and there's nothing you can do about it.
To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, how they live and die, that would be to make a significant move toward Enlightenment ideals, actually the classical liberal ideal. That would be revolutionary.
DB: There's another factor at work here, and I'd like you to address it. That is the psychological one that it's a lot easier to criticize something than to promote something constructive. There's a completely different dynamic at work.
You can see a lot of things wrong. Small changes you can propose. But to be realistic, substantial change, which will really change the large-scale direction of things and overcome major problems that we all see, will require profound democratization of the society and the economic system. If you take an enterprise, a business or a big corporation, internally it's a fascist structure. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out. There's very little else going on. Furthermore, the concentration of power in such structures means that virtually everything else, whether it's in the ideological or the political sphere, is sharply constrained, not totally controlled by any means, but sharply constrained. Those are just facts.
By now, the international economy imposes other kinds of constraints. You can't overlook those things. They're just true. If anybody bothered to read Adam Smith, instead of prating about him, they would see this pointed out very clearly. He pointed out that social policy is class-based. He took class analysis for granted. It wasn't even an issue. So, if you studied the canon properly at the University of Chicago, they taught you that Adam Smith denounced the mercantilist system and colonialism because he was in favor of free trade. That's half the truth. The other half of the truth is that he pointed out that the mercantilist system and colonialism were harmful to the people of England but very beneficial to the merchants and manufacturers who were the principal architects of policy. In short, it was a class-based policy which worked for the rich and powerful in England. The people of England paid the costs. He was opposed to that, because he was an enlightened intellectual, but he recognized it. Unless you recognize that you're just not in the real world.
DB: Huey Long once said that when fascism comes to this country it's going to be wrapped in an American flag. You have detected and commented on tendencies toward fascism in this country. You've even been quoting Hitler on the family and the role of women.
It was kind of striking. After the Republican convention (fortunately I saved my self the pain of watching television, but I read about it) it struck such chords that I began to look up some literature from the 1930s, contemporary literature on fascism. I looked up Hitler's speeches in the late 1930s to women's groups and big rallies. The rhetoric was very similar to that of the "God and country" rally the first night of the Republican convention. I don't really take that too seriously. The reason is that the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the corporate sector. They will permit rabid fundamentalists to scream about God and country and family, but they're very far from having any influence over major power decisions, as you could see from the way the campaign developed. They were given the first night to scream and yell. They were even given the party platform. It's pre-Enlightenment. But then when the campaign started we were back to business as usual.
However, that can change. One of the consequences of the growing alienation and isolation of people is that they begin to develop highly irrational and self-destructive attitudes. You want to try to identify yourself somehow. You don't want to be just glued to the television set. You want something in your life. If most of the constructive ways are cut off, you turn to other ways. You can see that in the polls, too. I was just looking at a study published in England, done by an American sociologist, of comparative religious attitudes in various countries. The figures are shocking. Three-quarters of the American population literally believes in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, God does this and that -- astonishing. These are numbers that you have nowhere in the industrial world. You've got to go to maybe mosques in Iran, or maybe do a poll among old ladies in Sicily. You might get numbers like this. This is the American population. Just a couple of years ago there was a study of what people thought of evolution. The percentage of the population that believed in Darwinian evolution at that point was nine percent. Like statistical error, basically. About half the population believed in divine guided evolution, Catholic church doctrine. About forty percent thought the world was created about six thousand years ago. Again, you've got to go back to pre-technological societies, or else devastated peasant societies, before you get numbers like that. Those are the kinds of belief systems that show up in things like the God and country rally. Religious fundamentalism can be a very scary phenomenon. That could be the mass base for popular movement of extreme danger. Also, these people are not stupid. They have huge amounts of money. They're organizing. They are moving the way they should, beginning to take over local offices where nobody notices them. There was a striking phenomenon in the last election, it even made the front pages of the national newspapers. It turned out that in many parts of the country ultraright fundamentalist fanatics had been running candidates without identifying them. It doesn't take a lot of work to get somebody elected to the school committee. Not too many people pay attention. You don't have to say who you are. You just appear with a friendly face and a smile and say, I'm going to help your kids, and people will vote for you. A lot of people got in as a result of organized campaigns to take over these local structures. That can build up and end up with a society that moves back to real pre-Enlightenment times. If that ties in with some charismatic power figure saying, "I'm your leader, follow me," that could be very ugly.
