Take from the Needy and Give to the Greedy 4 страница

DBWe’re not talking about a monolith here. You mentioned that Wall Street Journal article, Hunger Surges Among the Elderly. They had a piece a couple of days ago on the positive impact of government

welfare programs in South Carolina. The New York Times is writing about class conflict. So there are some contradictory streams here as well.

There are all sorts of contradictions. Take the cutback of the regulatory apparatus. The Times also had a big story a couple of weeks ago on the fact that the big investment firms are very unhappy about it. They need the Securities and Exchange Commission. A market, to the extent that it exists, is a very expensive affair. Markets cost a lot of money to set up and a lot of money to police. If you don’t set them up and you don’t police them there’s not going to be any market. There’s just going to be fraud and corruption and disaster and rapid collapses that are going to wipe things out. So the big guys, the big investment firms and financial institutions and banks, rely on the SEC as government intervention to protect the functioning of markets to the extent that they exist, which is a limited but not zero extent. And the attack on these commissions is something they’re not at all happy about. The same is true of the Commerce Department. The Commerce Department is now under attack by the Republican freshmen. But big business wants it. It just puts money into their pockets. The Commerce Department is one of the welfare systems for the rich, and they don’t want that to disappear.

The same is true on environmental issues. If you notice, this whole Republican freshman attack was going right after environmental issues. But they’re being beaten back on that one, to a large extent because big corporations who can think five years ahead realize that they would like to have a world five years from now in which they can make profits, not only today. The same with the FDA. The pharmaceutical corporations came out against dismantling the Food and Drug Administration. They’d maybe like it cut back, but they don’t want to dismantle it. They are

smart enough to figure out that if there is no regulation and independent assessment, five years from now there will be some kind of thalidomide catastrophe or something like that, and they’ll lose their international markets. And so it goes. There has always been a symbiotic relationship between big private capital and state power. They want to maintain it.

If you look back over American business history, there is one rather systematic split. Tom Ferguson has done some very interesting work on that, as have others. There’s been a consistent, pretty general distinction between capital-intensive, high-technology, internationally-oriented financial and industrial sectors on the one hand, which are the real big guys, and the labor-intensive, more domestically-oriented, less advanced technological parts of the system on the other. That’s what’s called “small business” here, but it’s not small by any means. That difference shows up in all sorts of things. So you find it in the lobbying system, the Business Council and more recently the Business Roundtable. That represents the big guys. They want a strong government. A lot of them in various forms even support New Deal measures. They instituted some of the New Deal measures. They were in favor of what they sometimes call welfare capitalism. They don’t mean by that money that goes into their pockets. What they mean is keeping a decent life for the working class, benefits for your workers. Which doesn’t cost them a lot. They are capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. They understand the point of a smoothly functioning society.

On the other hand, take the Chambers of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, who typically represented the other sector. They have quite different policies on many issues. One of the things that’s happening in Washington right now is an unusual shift of power toward the so-called small business side. The big business people are perfectly happy about it, as long as it keeps enriching them, which it’s doing. But they’re looking at it with a wary eye. The Gingrich

Republicans talk a kind of populist line. They even talk an anti-corporate line. Of course, they do nothing about it. If they ever start doing something about it, it will be interesting to watch the hammer fall. I don’t think they’re going to last very long. As long as they talk their populist line but pour money into the pockets of the rich, they can talk their line if they like. But when a conflict really develops, I think they will be quietly sent on their way.

DBYou’ve always commented that you weren’t too concerned if these guys—like let’s take these Republican shock troops, as they’re called, were the standard type of politician, skimming off the top, corrupt, etc.—that you would be concerned if they were different. Do you think they are different?

I think they represent something different which is interesting and important. They represent a kind of proto-fascism. And that’s dangerous. First of all, there’s the religious fanaticism, which is a very dangerous thing. There’s a cultural tone about them, which shows up all over the place, which has a very fascist character to it. All the things we’ve discussed reflect this. And there’s a real sadism. They really want to go for the jugular. Anybody who doesn’t meet their standards, which means, Enrich myself tomorrow, anybody who doesn’t meet that condition, they just want to kill, not just oppose, but destroy. They are quite willing—cynics like Gingrich are extreme, but others are willing— to try to engender fear and hatred against immigrants and poor people. They are very happy to do that. Their attitudes are extremely vicious.

You can see it all over. Take the state of Alabama that has not only restored chain gangs, but chain gangs where they truck rocks in for people to smash up. That’s real sadism. Also our governor, William Weld, who’s supposed to be a moderate. He’s one of the moderate

Republicans, a nice guy type. Just last week every day in the newspapers there was another headline about forcing people out of homeless shelters if he didn’t like the way they lived. Like some mother took off a day to take care of a mentally retarded child. Okay, out of the homeless shelter. He doesn’t like that. He thinks she should work, not take care of her child. Some disabled veteran didn’t want to move into a well-known drug den. Okay, out on the street. That’s one day. Next day comes state welfare, social services, have to report to the INS if they think somebody may be an illegal immigrant. Then they get deported. Which means their child gets deported. Their child could well be an American citizen. So American citizens have to be deported, according to the governor, if he doesn’t like the fact of the way their parents are here.

The real point of it, and his purpose, is to ensure that these children will starve to death because it means their parents won’t be able to go to get services. They won’t be able to go to school. So really kick the kids in the face. That’s the idea. It goes on like this, day after day. It was a series of these through the week, like written by Jonathan Swift. One day was a headline about how he was giving I forget how much money, but a couple of million dollars, to the guys who were running racetracks. They were also cutting down a tiny little pittance that went to try to deal with compulsive gambling. Compulsive gambling is an addiction, as harmful as other addictions. But you want to increase that addiction, and there’s a good reason for that. Gambling is a tax on the poor. His friends don’t go to the racetracks. It’s poor people who go to the racetracks, just like poor people buy lottery tickets. His friends don’t. That’s just another one of those massively regressive taxes on the poor. So let’s increase that and furthermore put more state funds into the hands of the racetrack owners who are doing it.

This is day after day. Pure sadism. Very self-conscious. He’s not a

fool. And he’s trying to build public support for it by building up fear and hatred. The idea is, There’s these teenage kids (who are black, by implication, although you don’t say that in a liberal state) who are just ripping us off by having lots and lots of babies. We don’t want to let them do that. So let’s hate them and let’s kick them in the face while I’m kicking you in the face. That’s real fascism. And that’s the liberal side. It’s not the Gingrich shock troops. That’s the liberal, moderate, educated side.

This runs across the spectrum. Take a look at it. This combination of extreme religious fanaticism, hysteria, intolerance, viciousness, sadism, fear, hatred, but with people who understand it very well, like Newt Gingrich, William Weld, and others, is a technique to ensure the increase of totalitarian power in the hands primarily of the private tyrannies, which they work for, but also in the hands of an increasingly powerful state which is more and more dedicated to security systems and devices for transferring funds towards the wealthy. That’s a prescription for fascism. That’s dangerous.

DBYou said the economic system is a “grotesque catastrophe.” What kind of system would you propose?

That’s the topic for another discussion. I would propose a system which is democratic. It’s long been understood (this has nothing to do with the left per se; it’s right through the American working-class movement, and independent social thinkers) that you don’t have democracy unless people are in control of the major decisions. And the major decisions, as has also long been understood, are fundamentally investment decisions: What do you do with the money? What happens in the country? What’s produced? How is it produced? What are working conditions like? Where does it go? How is it distributed? Where is it

sold? That whole range of decisions, that’s not everything in the world, but unless that range of decisions is under democratic control, you have one or another form of tyranny. That is as old as the hills and as American as apple pie. You don’t have to go to Marxism or anything else. It’s straight out of mainstream American tradition.

The reason is simple common sense. So that’s got to be the core of it. That means total dismantling of all the totalitarian systems. The corporations are just as totalitarian as Bolshevism and fascism. They come out of the same intellectual roots, in the early twentieth century. So just like other forms of totalitarianism have to go, private tyrannies have to go. And they have to be put under public control.

Then you look at the modalities of public control. Should it be workers’ councils or community organizations or some integration of them? What kind of federal structure should there be? At this point you’re beginning to think about how a free and democratic society might look and operate. That’s worth a lot of thought. But we’re a long way from that. The first thing you’ve got to do in any kind of change is to recognize the forms of oppression that exist. If slaves don’t recognize that slavery is oppression, it doesn’t make much sense to ask them why they don’t live in a free society. They think they do. This is not a joke.

Take women. Overwhelmingly, and for a long time, they may have sensed oppression, but they didn’t see it as oppression. They saw it as life. The fact that you don’t see it as oppression doesn’t mean that you don’t know it at some level. At some level you know it. The way in which you know it can take very harmful forms for yourself and everyone else. That’s true of every system of oppression. But unless you sense it, identify it, understand it, understand furthermore that it’s not, as in that New Yorker article, the genius of the market and a mystery, but completely understandable and not a genius of anything, and easily put under popular control—unless all those things are understood, you

cannot proceed to the next step, which is the one you raised: How can we change the system?

I think you can figure out how to change the system by reading the independent working class press 150 years ago that we talked about earlier. These were ordinary working people, artisans, “factory girls” from New England farms, and so on. They knew how to change the system. You know, too. They were strongly opposed to what they called “the New Spirit of the Age: Gain wealth, forgetting all but Self.” They wanted to retain the high culture they already had, the solidarity, the sympathy, the control. They didn’t want to be slaves. They thought that the Civil War was fought to end slavery, not to institute it. All of these things are perfectly common perceptions, perfectly correct. You can turn them into ways in which a much more free society can function.

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