This Country Needs a Few Good Communists

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/Posted
on May 31, 2010

By Chris Hedges

The witch hunts against communists in the United States were used to silence
socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who defied the abuses of
capitalism. Those “anti-Red” actions were devastating blows to the political
health of the country. The communists spoke the language of class war. They
understood that Wall Street, along with corporations such as British
Petroleum, is the enemy. They offered a broad social vision which allowed
even the non-communist left to employ a vocabulary that made sense of the
destructive impulses of capitalism. But once the Communist Party, along with
other radical movements, was eradicated as a social and political force,
once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and
collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed
of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We became fearful, timid and
ineffectual. We lost our voice and became part of the corporate structure we
should have been dismantling.

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the
language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl
Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian
mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we
have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx
did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit,
pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor
families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make
profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs,
gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and
crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women.
They worship only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism
is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human
lives until it finally consumes itself. The nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico
is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same nightmare
seen in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in New England to the
abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and
Afghans, mourning their dead, live each day.

Capitalism was once viewed in America as a system that had to be fought. But
capitalism is no longer challenged. And so, even as Wall Street steals
billions of taxpayer dollars and the Gulf of Mexico is turned into a toxic
swamp, we do not know what to do or say. We decry the excesses of capitalism
without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. The liberal class
has a misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that have
refused to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe
in the Gulf of Mexico. Liberals bow before a Democratic Party that ignores
them and does the bidding of corporations. The reflexive deference to the
Democrats by the liberal class is the result of cowardice and fear. It is
also the result of an infantile understanding of the mechanisms of power.
The divide is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between
the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and
workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.

Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and
filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the
working class, have been transformed into domesticated partners of the
capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple bartering tools. The
social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working
class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour day and Social
Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science
and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated
capitalism and have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most
religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism. The Democratic Party
and the press have become corporate servants. The loss of radicals within
the labor movement, the Democratic Party, the arts, the church and the
universities has obliterated one of the most important counterweights to the
corporate state. And the purging of those radicals has left us unable to
make sense of what is happening to us.

The fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism, has resulted in
the steady suspension of civil liberties, including freedom of speech,
habeas corpus and the right to organize, values the liberal class claims to
support. It was the orchestration of fear that permitted the capitalist
class to ram through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948 in the name of
anti-communism, the most destructive legislative blow to the working class
until the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was fear that
created the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, offshore penal colonies
where we torture and the endless wars in the Middle East. And it was fear
that was used to see us fleeced by Wall Street. If we do not stop being
afraid and name our enemy we will continue toward a state of neofeudalism.

The robber barons of the late 19th century used goons and thugs to beat up
workers and retain control. The corporations, employing the science of
public relations, have used actors, artists, writers, scholars and
filmmakers to manipulate and shape public opinion. Corporations employ the
college-educated, liberal elite to saturate the culture with lies. The
liberal class should have defied the emasculation of radical organizations,
including the Communist Party. Instead, it was lured into the corporate
embrace. It became a class of collaborators. National cohesion, because our
intellectual life has become so impoverished, revolves around the empty
pursuits of mass culture, brands, consumption, status and the bland
uniformity of opinions disseminated by corporate-friendly courtiers. We
speak and think in the empty slogans and clichés we are given. And they are
given to us by the liberal class.

The “idea of the intellectual vocation,” as Irving Howe
<http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_howe.html>pointed
out in his essay “The Age of
Conformity,”<http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOywtRL7UVEC&pg=RA1-PA123&lpg=RA1-PA123&dq=%22the+age+of+conformity%22&source=bl&ots=yLVX04wqhl&sig=EX-hi3P9qrCG6JVm8M2JpiSDBD8&hl=en&ei=XCADTKHxJYP8NbSy5Ts&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CC8Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22the%20age%20of%20conformity%22&f=true>“the
idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a
commercial civilization—has gradually lost its allure. And, it is this,
rather than the abandonment of a particular program, which constitutes our
rout.” The belief that capitalism is the unassailable engine of human
progress, Howe added, “is trumpeted through every medium of communication:
official propaganda, institutional advertising and scholarly writings of
people who, until a few years ago, were its major opponents.”

“The truly powerless people are those intellectuals—the new realists—who
attach themselves to the seats of power, where they surrender their freedom
of expression without gaining any significance as political figures,” Howe
wrote. “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in
the past few decades—as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and
‘intellect’—that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited
institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness
but to one extent or another *they cease to function as intellectuals*. The
institutional world needs intellectuals *because* they are intellectuals but
it does not want them *as* intellectuals. It beckons to them because of what
they are but it will not allow them, at least within its sphere of
articulation, either to remain or entirely cease being what they are. It
needs them for their knowledge, their talent, their inclinations and
passions; it insists that they retain a measure of these endowments, which
it means to employ for its own ends, and without which the intellectuals
would be of no use to it whatever. A simplified but useful equation suggests
itself: the relation of the institutional world to the intellectuals is as
the relation of middlebrow culture to serious culture, the one battens on
the other, absorbs and raids it with increasing frequency and skill,
subsidizes and encourages it enough to make further raids possible—at times
the parasite will support its victim. Surely this relationship must be one
reason for the high incidence of neurosis that is supposed to prevail among
intellectuals. A total estrangement from the sources of power and prestige,
even a blind unreasoning rejection of every aspect of our culture, would be
far healthier if only because it would permit a free discharge of
aggression.”

The liberal class prefers comfort to confrontation. It will not challenge
the decaying structures of the corporate state. It is intolerant within its
ranks of those who do. It clings pathetically to the carcass of the Obama
presidency. It has been exposed as a dead force in American politics. We
must find our way back to the old radicals, to the discredited Marxists,
socialists and anarchists, including Dwight Macdonald and Dorothy Day.
Language is our first step toward salvation. We cannot fight what we cannot
describe.