Chapter 4 : Ideology and Manipulation

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Chapter 4

In April, 1961, the State Department told the people of the United States and Ambassador Adlai Stevenson told the United Nations that the Cuban government had “betrayed” the Cuban revolution. This is bizarre. Cuba had carried out a democratic revolution for the first time in the history of the Americas.

Cuba had not only proclaimed, but substantially realized, a program almost identical to the one betrayed in the United States in the 1790s by Hamilton and the security-holding capitalists.[144] One must assume that Ambassador Stevenson, who is widely known as an intellectual, is familiar with history—or at least with American history’. Yet in his outburst to the United Nations, he not only displayed ignorance of the rules of the United Nations, which do not allow the type of meddling in the internal affairs of another state that Mr. Stevenson indulged in; he also displayed incredible ignorance (for an “intellectual”) of his own coun- I try’s 170-year old betrayal of its own [revolution. Before his Ambassadorial I mission, Mr. Stevenson had earned I great fame and popularity among American liberals for professing to hold and cherish the equalitarian democratic ideals betrayed in the United States in the 1790s. And yet he called ‘ “betrayal” the success of those very ideals; he termed “betrayal” the Cuban victory over the very system that had betrayed the democratic ideal in the United States. Stevenson told the United Nations that “there was great sympathy in the United States for the proclaimed goals of the Cuban revolution when it took place.”[145] This is a paradoxical claim. The last time there was official sympathy in the United States for the realization of democratic goals was in 1776—and the Cuban revolution had not then taken place. Yet Mr. Stevenson’s statement is not an outright lie. Mr. Stevenson is an honorable man. His statement does not say there was sympathy in the United States for the realization of the goals of the Cuban revolution; it says there was sympathy for the “proclaimed goals.” In this sense, Mr. Stevenson’s statement was unchallengably true and is in the best tradition of American rhetoric, which consists of the proclamation of democratic ideals alongside the realization, consolidation, and undisturbed growth of capitalist property, privilege, and power. Democracy is the ideological cover beneath which the aristocracy of the “rich and well born” extends its dominion. And this is what the Cuban revolution betrayed. Cuba did not merely proclaim a democratic ideal, as had been done over and over again everywhere in the Americas; Cuba also proceeded to carry out the democratic goals, and by taking this unprecedented step the Cuban revolution dealt an irreparable blow to the “inter-American system” and the capitalist facade.

The Cuban people understood, from painful experience, that “wheresoever possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may justly be governed and prosperously flourish.”[146] But this understanding was not enough to carry through a revolution; with understanding alone, they would have confined their political activity to the writing of Utopias. They also needed T homas Miinzer’s “courage and strength to realize the impossible,” because the obstacles arrayed against their success were extraordinary. The handful of United States corporations with vested interests in Cuban land, resources, and men had greater wealth and power than all Cuba. Any one of the corporations could have bought a puppet leader, supplied an army, and invaded Cuba—and a combination of corporations did in fact invade Cuba under the auspices of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Yet the Cuban people successfully repelled the invaders who tried to accomplish by violence what had been accomplished by fraud after the American revolution. And Cuba went on expropriating the corporate landlords in spite of terrific pressure and violent opposition far greater and bloodier than that which had provoked an earlier French revolution’s frantic self-defense by means of a Reign of Terror. Cubans continued to give reality to the “proclaimed goals” of democracy and continued to betray the brutally undemocratic practice of their complacent accusers.

Thus Cuba’s betrayal was very serious. Cuba had betrayed every major prop of the capitalist edifice. After United States capitalism had succeeded in consolidating the means of production, education, communication, and violence, it had claimed to possess a monopoly of the democratic ideals as well. Cuba’s betrayal consisted, not only of disrupting the monopoly of United States capitalists over Cuban land, food, and human life, but also of disrupting the monopoly United States capitalists claimed over the democratic ideal. By depriving the corporate rich of their profits, their ideology, as well as their ability to regain their lost property and privilege by means of violence, and by exposing in unmistakable terms the relationship between the democratic proclamations and the barbarous practice of the Northern Goliath, the Cuban revolution dealt what is probably the most painful blow felt by American capitalism since its Hamiltonian establishment. The complacency and smugness of American capitalism momentarily wore thin, and the wild beast, feeling caged for the first time, raged with a brutal determination to destroy every living creature on earth before departing.

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Perhaps the most ingenious achievement of American capitalists was the manner in which they laid claim over the democratic ideal they had betrayed. The indignant accusations of democrats against the capitalist betrayal of the American people had not yet died down before the capitalists took up the claim that they were themselves “the people.” Yet, before die coup d’etat of 1787, the division between democrats and anti-democrats had been quite clear. The aristocratic Hamilton did not think himself a democrat, nor did he claim to be one. Hamilton made no attempt to hide his sympathy for the rich and well born or his contempt for “the mass of the people.” Nor did Hamilton consider it necessary to conceal from public scrutiny his view that “Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.” And Jefferson, though he was, as Hamilton said, “as likely as any man I know to temporize ... and the probable result of such a temper is the preservation of systems,”[147] nevertheless did not surrender his democratic theory to the system with which he “temporized” in practice. Even as late as 1823, after United States capitalists had enjoyed thirty lucrative years as the New World’s ruling class, Jefferson still held that capitalists constituted an aristocracy of privilege, that the new aristocracy, as the old, would govern by means of force, fraud, and the maintenance of ignorance, and that aristocracy was not synonymous with democracy: “...at the formation of our government, many had formed their political opinions on European writings and practices, believing the experience of old countries, and especially of England, abusive as it was, to be a safer guide than mere theory. The doctrines of Europe were, that men in numerous associations cannot be restrained within the limits of order and justice, but by forces physical and moral, wielded over them by authorities independent of their will. Hence their organization of kings, hereditary nobles, and priests. Still further to constrain the brute force of the people, they deem it necessary to keep them down by herd labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus barely to sustain a scanty and miserable life. And these earnings they apply to maintain their privileged orders in splendor and idleness, to fascinate the eyes of the people, and excite in them an humble adoration and submission, as to an order of superior beings.”[148] Jefferson’s own party, on the other hand, “believed that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves, and to follow their reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed than with minds nourished in error, and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence and oppression. The cherishment of the people then was our principle, the fear and distrust of them, that of the other party.”[149]

Nor was there great misunderstanding, in post-revolutionary America, either about the democratic nature of the Constitution or about its popular approval. An opponent of the Constitution’s ratification wrote in 1788 a satirical analysis of the type of regime America could expect if the document was ratified: “The legislature have no right to interfere with private contracts, and debtors might safely trust to the humanity and clemency of their creditors who will not keep them in jail all their lives, unless they deserve it ... Men of great property are deeply interested in the welfare of the state; and they are the most competent judges of the form of government, best calculated to preserve their property, and such liberties as it is proper for the common and inferior class of people to enjoy. Men of wealth possess natural and acquired understanding, as they manifest by amassing riches, or by keeping and increasing those they derive from their ancestors, and they are best acquainted with the wants, the wishes, and desires of the people, and they are always ready to relieve them in their private and public stations.”[150] Such a popular revolutionary hero as Patrick Henry denounced the Constitution. “I believe it to be a fact that the great body of yeomanry are in decided opposition to it.... You have not solid reality —the hearts and hands of the men who are to be governed;”[151] and he devoted great energy to oppose the Constitution’s ratification in Virginia. Henry later acquired an estate, became conservative, and smugly shared the privileges he had earlier denounced. (Ironically, Patrick Henry has lately become the hero of American reactionary groups who employ Henry’s revolutionary denunciations of privilege and oppression to justify privilege and oppression. But perhaps the latter-day admirers of Patrick Henry are unfamiliar with their hero’s revolutionary youth and admire rather his conservative retirement. It is puzzling that the “patriotic societies” should worship the conservative estate owner, however, since as a smug rich man, Henry made no fiery pronouncements.)

Many were well aware that the Constitution, and the government founded on it, was not a “government of all.” Many knew it was untrue that “its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all.”[152] Even the great John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the first real “expert” on the Constitution, as well as an ardent supporter of the document and its purpose, was well aware that the Constitution had not been universally applauded, supported, or adopted by the American people. He wrote in his Life of Washington “that even after the subject had been discussed for a considerable time, the fate of the constitution could scarcely be conjectured; and so small in many instances, was the majority in its favor, as to afford strong ground for the opinion that, had the influence of character been removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption.... a dread of dismemberment, not an approbation of the particular system under consideration, had induced an acquiescence in it.”[153] Nor was Marshall confused about the interests that were served by the Constitution, or about the interests that were suppressed. Being one of those who, in Jefferson’s description, “deem it necessary to keep [the people] down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance,” Justice Marshall wrote with unconcealed admiration about the creditors who acquired immense fortunes, not by industry, but by legislation. Marshall wrote that they “struggled with unabated zeal for the exact observance of public and private engagements.... They were consequently the uniform friends of a regular administration of justice, and of a vigorous course of taxation which would enable the state to comply with its engagements. By a natural association of ideas, they were also, with very few exceptions, in favor of enlarging the powers of the federal government.”[154]

Thus, up to the time of the ratification there was no ideological confusion about the “democratic” nature of capitalism nor about the “democratic” intentions of the Constitution. The document was recognized as a blatant piece of class legislation. Nor was there confusion about the “democratic election” by which the Constitution was ratified. The people who were to be affected by the document received no education on the issues involved; the voters were not informed that the majority of the drafters were security-holders and capitalists; and the group that was to be affected most adversely by the document: the debtors, poor farmers, and laborers—the majority of the population— did not vote. Beard summarized the process by which the Constitution was ratified: “...the disfranchisement of the masses through property qualifications and ignorance and apathy contributed largely to the facility with which the personalty{3}-interest representatives carried the day. The latter were alert everywhere, for they knew, not as a matter of theory, but as a practical matter of dollars and cents, the value of the new Constitution. They were well informed. They were conscious of the identity of their interests. They were well organized. They knew for weeks in advance, even before the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, what the real nature of the contest was. They resided for the most part in the towns, or the more thickly populated areas, and they could marshall their forces quickly and effectively. They had also the advantage of appealing to all discontented persons who exist in large numbers in every society and are ever anxious for betterment through some change in political machinery.…

“The opposition on the other hand suffered from the difficulties connected with getting a backwoods vote out to the town and county elections. This involved sometimes long journeys in bad weather, for it will be remembered that the elections were held in the late fall and winter. There were no such immediate personal gains to be made through the defeat of the Constitution, as were to be made by the security holders on the other side. It was true the debtors knew that they would probably have to settle their accounts in full and the small farmers were aware that taxes would have to be paid to discharge the national debt if the Constitution was adopted; and the debtors everywhere waged war against the Constitution—of this there is plenty of evidence. But they had no money to carry on their campaign; they were poor and uninfluential—the strongest batallions were not on their side. The wonder is that they came so near defeating the Constitution at the polls.”[155]

During the conflict over ratification, a momentous event took place. Many of the democrats who had initially opposed ratification switched sides when the capitalists promised that, after the Constitution was adopted, a bill of rights would immediately be appended to it. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the American revolution was that the American people, so recently emerged from a successful anti-colonial revolution with no historical precedents, did not foresee that their victory would be followed by a counter-revolution. Fanners left the revolutionary army and returned to their lands, confident that the abhorrent British system would surely not be restored by Americans who had fought against it. They returned to their farms content with the hope that their lot would improve now that their labor no longer supported wealthy landowners in England. When the Constitutional conflict raged in the towns, the farmers received little accurate information of it, they heard a few reports that sounded preposterous, and they did not attach too much importance to the issue. As time passed, their lot did not improve—but time also dulled their expectations. Many years later they, or their children, were confronted by capitalists to whom they had mortgaged their land. They were given the choice of becoming the capitalists’ tenants or of going to the growing cities and becoming wage laborers. But by then the revolution was only vaguely remembered: it had become a part of History.

The liberals, the intellectuals, those democrats who stayed in the towns, had, unlike the capitalists, no program, no organization, and no plan of action. The revolution had succeeded. A great democratic experiment was to take place on the American continent, an experiment which would show to all mankind “that all men are created equal” and are endowed with “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These goals were inspiring; they crystallized with great brevity and conciseness the finest ideals of the Western European “enlightenment,” but they were very vague about the course of action to be followed for their attainment. And, as Jefferson said, “we shall not live to see the result.” Consequently, when ardent capitalists, whose vision of the great debt they’d pay themselves animated their tongues, told the liberals about the marvelous document that would give a new birth to America, the liberals listened, and they temporized. They were theoretically opposed to the document, for they could not but notice that the “inviolability of property” had been written into it too many times and in too many forms, and that such a principle could only lead to the violability of human life, liberty, and happiness. But liberals, in whom the American revolutionaries had unfortunately placed their trust, are men who in theory believe in the possibility of a better society, but in practice accept the institutions of a worse society. And as the cunning Hamilton so well knew, “the probable result of such a temperament is the preservation of systems, though originally opposed...” So, when the liberals were harrassed by so many wealthy and powerful men, they reexamined the document. The Constitution did, after all, provide for elections as well as for a parliament. Eighteenth century democrats were not under the illusion that elections and parliament constituted democracy; they were familiar enough with history to know that elections and parliaments had long existed in undemocratic England, in ancient Rome, and even in the feudal middle ages; they were quite enlightened about the undemocratic use to which tyrannies, aristocracies, and oligarchies had put elections and parliaments. It was not the provision for elections and parliament that changed the minds of the democratic liberals, but the promise of a bill of rights, “providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force ofthe habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury...”[156] They must have thought that surely a bill of rights, supplemented by elections and a parliament, would prove too much of an obstacle for the avaricious “stock-jobbers.” They must have hoped that surely the capitalist interlude would be only temporary, the democratic experiment would continue with undiminished zeal, that “as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”[157] Consequently, with “a dread of dismemberment, not an approbation of the particular system under consideration,” the liberal democrats and the capitalists reached a compromise on the bill of rights. The liberals changed their votes. If they had not changed their votes so quickly, there might have been time to inform the population about the momentous issues involved. But so many men of great wealth, power and influence were in such a hurry. And liberals are above all expedient and practical men. Since it is never expedient or practical to oppose or delay wealth, power, and influence, the liberals changed their votes quickly. As Jefferson said, “What is practicable must often control what is pure theory.”

So the Constitution was ratified; it was amended by a bill of rights; it became die law of the land. And thereupon a strange, unexpected, barely perceptible event took place. Before its adoption, the Constitution had been merely a document written by a few capitalists, a document whose flaws and tendencies every liberal and radical democrat could recognize and denounce. But after its adoption this document of dubious value and questionable quality became The Law. Before the Constitution’s adoption, the democrats had known that the capitalists constituted a small but dangerous anti-democratic element But after the adoption, the surprised democrats were confronted by a Leviathan: the small, anti-democratic element had suddenly acquired Authority and Power: the capitalists now constituted The State. Even the conservative Adams, Federalist successor of George Washington, was well aware of what had taken place. Adams wrote in 1808: “We do possess one material which actually constitutes an aristocracy that governs the nation. That material is wealth.” The liberals had miscalculated; they had not expected a mere document composed by a handful of capitalists to become transformed into a way of life for generations of men; they had not known that they were inscribing their names on the gravestone of American democracy.

Eighteenth century democrats knew a great deal about the natural rights of men and about the brutal abuses of tyrants. But they too lightly dismissed the psychological effects of vested authority. They were familiar with the fraud and violence by which medieval feudalism had maintained its Earthly City. But they’d forgotten the repulsive phenomenon of men destroying, murdering, and dying because the Authority of the Church had decreed that Christians must destroy Mohammedans in the name of Jesus Christ. And they’d forgotten how many times aristocracies and monarchies, acting “in the name of the people,” had used Authority to gain their ends by using one portion of the people to rob and massacre another portion of the people. What the liberals underestimated was the extent to which Authority absolves crime.

If one man robs another on the street, he is a thief. But if a group of thieves robs an entire nation from a legislature, they are not considered criminals. They have Authority. They are the Legislators of the Land. Their robbery is always “in the national interest” and they speak “in the name of the people.” And anyone who should try to prosecute the criminals in power is guilty of high treason. The capitalist or the banker need no longer feel ashamed of his “calling,” for in a capitalist state with a capitalist Constitution, a usurer is no longer despised; he has become “a man who has a due sense of the sacred obligation of a just debt;[158] he has become a Respectable Man.

Draped with Authority, the Constitution ceased to appear a blatant piece of class legislation drafted by self-seeking security-holders. It was strangely transformed, not only into the law of the land, but also into an “expression of the will of the people.” Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall had written that “the fate of the constitution could scarcely be conjectured; and so small in many instances, was the majority in its favor, as to afford strong ground for the opinion that, had the influence of character been removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption....” Yet only twelve years later, the very same Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the following: “The government [of the United States] proceeds directly from the people; it is ‘ordained and established’ in the name of the people; and it is declared to be ordained in ‘order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty’ to themselves and to their posterity.... The government of the Union then ... is emphatically and truly, a government of the people. In form and substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them and are to be exercised directly on them and for their benefit.... It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all.”[159]

Thus, by 1819, the capitalists who had once constituted a small but dangerous anti-democratic force, had become “emphatically and truly, a government of the people.” The aristocracy of wealth now calls itself a democracy. The government of “paper and patronage,” of what John Taylor called “a sly thief, who empties your pockets under a pretense of paying your debts,” whose rule is “a climate deadly to liberty,”[160] had now been launched on its career of plunder, oppression and crime, all committed in the name of Freedom, Liberty, and National Defense.

As Taylor observed, “The aristocracy of superstition defended itself by exclaiming, the Gods! the temples! the sacred oracles! divine vengeance! and Elysian fields!—and that of paper and patronage exclaims, national faith! sacred charters! disorganization! and security of property!”[161] And many years after Taylor’s death, the aristocracy of paper and patronage did not hesitate to borrow from the aristocracy of superstition, and add to its own armory, the exclamations, the Gods! the temples! and the Elysian fields of Our Way of Life!

When the ideals of revolutionaries became the ideology of counter-revolutionaries, the democrats were disarmed. When capitalists in power called themselves democrats, the democrats out of power had little ground to stand on. It had been difficult enough for democrats to oppose an aristocracy that claimed to be superior to other men. But it was virtually impossible for democrats to oppose an aristocracy that claimed to rule in the name of the people, that claimed its wealth enriched the people, that claimed its wars of conquest and plunder were for the defense of the people. By appropriating the democratic ideal, the capitalists emasculated the democrats. From here on, the vast literature in defense of democracy was used by capitalists to defend capitalism. From here on, every man who still spoke favorably of democratic ideals was seen as a defender of capitalism. If usury was Freedom and theft Democracy, then radical democrats had no choice but to cut out their tongues and paint their intentions to their fellow men. Capitalist as well as older aristocracies all over Europe followed the lead of their American bretheren, and before long every form of tyranny and oppression, without undergoing a revolution, without any change whatever, called itself a democracy. And it took radical democrats almost half a century to abandon the name of their cherished ideal, and to realize that if oppression was called Democracy, then democracy would have to be called communism, or socialism, or even anarchy. Radical democrats lost their unity and coherence until the brilliant historian and scholar Karl Marx recast and crystallized the fragmented pieces of the democratic ideal into a powerful new mold. However, while gaining unity and coherence from the newly formulated program and the untainted name, the democrats confirmed and greatly strengthened the capitalist claim to a monopoly on the democratic ideal. Whatever the virtues of the new name, the Communist Manifesto wrote the democratic goals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity on the banners of men who could no longer call themselves democrats.

Historians who do not write to enlighten their readers, but to endear themselves with those in power, quickly caught on to the nature of their important task within the capitalist regime. When the American revolution was still within the memory of living men, books that told of the security-holders’ coup d’etat were entitled “The Birth and Growth of Democracy.” Before long men spoke of the history of American capitalism as the “History of American Democracy,” and exotic new topics like Hamiltonian Democracy, Jacksonian Democracy, Southern Democracy, Midwestern Democracy, and Grass Roots Democracy, filled scholarly monographs. In Britain there appeared a Victorian Democracy, and elsewhere there were Constitutional Monarchies, Equalitarian Oligarchies, and even a few Democratic Kingdoms. And in the middle of the twentieth century, an alliance of capitalist, feudal, and fascist military states called itself The Free World. American children were indoctrinated to believe that the unscrupulous brutality of Rockefeller, the cunning thievery of Carnegie, the criminal usury of Morgan, were ideal models of the Democratic Way of Life and living proof “that all men are created equal.” And on the world scene, American capitalists harrassed the unfed, unprivileged millions in the colonies to choose between Socialism, which, they said, gives “only bread,” and The American Way, which, they said, gives “freedom.” But by the middle of the twentieth century, too many miserable men knew that the “freedom” given by capitalists was the freedom of slaves to work for their masters or die. Too many knew that the freedom of capitalists was restricted to the capitalists, and that other men received only its obverse side: misery and oppression. And yet when men rejected The .American Way and chose the possibility for both “bread” as well as their land was invaded by the “arsenal of democracy;” they were subjected to terrorist reprisals, sabotage, and massacre that did not and would not end; and during the campaign of utterly inhuman rationally manufactured horror, they were told, by Hamilton’s and Rockefeller’s heirs, that they had “betrayed” their revolution.

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The democratic ideal required that all men have equal power, voice and influence in all the important matters of the human community. For this to be possible, land and wealth had to be equalized, since “If wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few, either by a feudal or a stock monopoly, it carries the power also; and a government becomes as certainly aristocratical, by a monopoly of wealth, as by a monopoly of arms.”[162] The equalization of land and wealth was to take place either in the form suggested by More, Winstanley, Babeuf, and their followers by making the earth a “common treasury” and for every son and daughter of mankind to live free upon;” or in the form suggested by Taylor, Jefferson, and most ofthe early American liberal democrats: by dividing the land among its tillers, by government “restriction of monopolies,” by agrarian reform. In either case “cutthroat competition” would have been a crime, and the enslavement and employment of some men by other man would not have been tolerated. Every advancement in knowledge and in technology would have benefitted all men; and even those men who were otherwise inclined would have had to seek personal advancement by cooperation and not war. For such a society to survive and maintain itself, all men would have to be educated, not in the mystifications of a ruling class, but in the relations of each to his fellows, his society, and his age, as well as in the ideals and potentialities of human life. Without such education, the experiment would surely fail, “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”[163] To supplement the general education, there must be concrete and full information on all important issues. For example, if a constitution is proposed, citizens cannot exert intelligent control over this most important affair of the nation unless they are informed of the exact number of drafters who attended the Convention in order to benefit their fellow men, and the exact number who attended in order to defraud and plunder their fellow men. Since information is always colored by the man who transmits it, there must be untrammeled freedom of speech—which means that every man has access to the ears of all; and there mast be unlimited freedom of the press—which means that one man’s written thoughts are as prominently distributed and as widely available as any other’s. Since concrete and complete information would play such a crucial role in a democracy, publicly disseminated lies and deceptions would not be permitted any more than they are in science, and men would be encouraged to express important and imaginative ideas and discouraged from publishing unoriginal or familiar ones. Freedom of speech and of the press obviously did not mean that a few men would be “free” to address and inform the rest, while most men were “free” to speak to and write for their own friends. There’s nothing democratic about such an arrangement—and nothing new. Every form of government in human history, whether monarchy or tyranny, aristocracy or oligarchy, has provided unrestricted freedom of expression to a few, and has given to the rest the “freedom” to express themselves to their friends—but this is not democracy, nor is it an achievement, since only a total police state composed of illiterate, tongueless and mindless men could prevent such “freedom” from taking place. And lastly, the democratic ideal required the participation of every man in the important affairs of society. Participation in trivialities was nothing new: even in the repressive tyranny of the Russian Czars, the poorest men could “participate” in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church and in the celebrations of cheering the Czar; in every slave society, the slaves could “participate” in their masters’ affairs by doing their masters’ work. Democratic participation was to open a new era in man’s relation to man: each human being was to be master of his fate, insofar as his fate did not depend on natural obstacles; each man was to control the direction and content of his life.

Thus there were four main principles for a democratic government. They have been given many names by many men. John Taylor called them justice, knowledge, honesty, and self-government.[164] These four principles can be examined within a social context in terms of the distribution of land, wealth, and privilege; the quality of education; the facility of communication; the degree of participation in the important affairs of society. All other social institutions can then be evaluated in terms of these four principles, and their democratic or undemocratic character can thus be ascertained.{4}

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The first requirement of the democratic society is that all men have equal power and influence—it is what John Taylor called Justice. The perennial symbol of Justice is a scale in balance. In order to have equal power and influence, men must have equal control over the means of exerting power and influence, and every augmentation of society’s means of power must pass to all men. Obviously this state of affairs cannot exist in a society where a few men have a monopoly over the means of power. This power will enable the few to appropriate any new means of power which become available to society. With their augmented power, the few will have yet greater access to more power. Once this process is allowed to start, it clearly will not end until very few men have an unchallengeable monopoly over all available means of power, influence and control.

The history of the United States is not a history of Justice, of a scale in balance. It is not the history of a Society of Equals. American history is a history of capitalism. If there was once hope that wealth and privilege would be equalized by the peaceful means of agrarian reform, cancellation of debts, and division of unoccupied land among its tillers, that hope was killed by the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution hallowed the property of the rich and condoned the enrichment of some by means of the impoverishment of those less able to defend themselves. Hamilton’s fiscal program enlarged on the Constitution by giving public money to the unsavory’ group who had speculated on the revolutionary war. The Hamiltonian program encouraged these men to employ the wealth and labor of the nation to enrich themselves yet further, created a bank to help their acquisitive projects, and as if this weren’t enough, increased the taxes and used violence to collect them, in order to enlarge the bank’s funds. Alexander Hamilton, who saw, feared, and despised the democratic leanings and hopes of the American people, delineated clearly the type of society he wanted established on the American continent. Hamilton’s ideal was not a commonwealth of freedom, equality and brotherhood. It was a society of “the few and the many. The first are the rich and well bom, the other the mass of the people.... Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.”[165]

Hamilton was undoubtedly pleased by the New World that emerged from the Constitutional Convention and its aftermath. It was a society where part of the nation were negro slaves whose entire lives were the private property of plantation owners, where another part of the nation were tenant farmers and workers whose time and labor were the private property of capitalists. The wealth of the nation was safely lodged in the hands of “the few,” the “rich and well born,” and “If wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few, either by a feudal or a stock monopoly, it carries the power also...”[166] With wealth and power, and with a legal system designed to protect wealth and power, the “rich and well born” quickly appropriated to themselves the land as well as the labor of “the many.” The previous chapter, on the Growth of Capitalism, reviewed the historical process by which “the few” appropriated the land, wealth and power of the nation. With the invention and development of technological means of production, a tremendous new source of power became available to society. But in capitalist America, technology was not used for the collective enrichment and creative development of all human beings but to enlarge the power of the rich and well bom. During the 1860’s, a fabulously mushrooming enrichment of the rich took place. The Hamiltonian dream passed into frenzy as delirious capitalists “exploited national resources, waged economic wars among themselves, entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain, and used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors; they killed off competing and independent businesses, and employed lawyers of skill and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their privileges.”[167] The United States became a hot house for the growth of fortunes. Ambitious, mindless and determined men abandoned their lives and homes in other parts of the world and frantically hurried to gamble for the big take in the gold rush. The overwhelming majority of gamblers lost, and they spent their lives in the New World as immigrant laborers whose slums and working conditions were in many cases worse than those they’d left. As in all gold rushes, however, the gold was not long available to all comers. The gold rush was institutionalized, and all the gold was carefully channeled into the hands of the mine owners, the hands of those who had the wealth and power to buy the “rights.” As one observer summarized, “From the time of the Panic of 1873, which signaled the death of the old individualistic entrepreneur, the corporation was the key institution of the American economic system.”[168]

A social system which lodges an excess of power in the hands of “the few” and condones the further augmentation of that power, will in rime lodge a monopoly of wealth and power into the hands of very few men. And this is in fact the central characteristic of twentieth century America. I have already quoted the authoritative corporation lawyer who estimated that “Slightly more than half [of American industry] is owned outright by not more than 200 corporations.”[169] I have also quoted the sociologist who translated this fact into its social meaning: “Within the financial and political boundaries of the corporation, the industrial revolution itself has been concentrated. Corporations command raw materials, and the patents on inventions with which to turn them into finished products. They command the most expensive, and therefore what must be the finest, legal minds in the world, to invent and to refine their defenses and their strategies. They employ man as producer and they make that which he buys as consumer. They clothe him and feed him and invest his money. They make that with which he fights the wars and they finance the ballyhoo of advertisement and the obscurantist bunk of public relations that surround him during the wars and between them.”[170]

Thus the United States is not a society where all men have equal wealth, power and influence. It is a society where Justice is monopolized by the “rich and well bom.” The scale is out of balance: on the lower half the weight of “the mass of mankind” supports “the few” on the upper half. A few men have a monopoly of wealth, power and influence, as well as a monopoly over the means of augmenting wealth, power and influence. “The mass of mankind” are instruments of the rich; they are tools, they are employed as “hands;” their labor and time are not their own, they are not their own masters, they do not exert control over the important matters of their lives. The influence and voice of the majority of Americans is symbolized by an Intercommunication System in a capitalist factory or industrial plant— what workers call a “bitch-box.” The “boss” has a centralized “box” in his office from which he can call and direct all the workers; the workers, in turn, have the power and voice, they have the “freedom,” to answer the boss’s call. The United States is a society of masters and servants, euphemized as “employers” and “employes,” or “management and labor.” It differs slightly, but significantly, from a slave or serf society. In a slave society, the master has absolute power over the entire lives and fortunes of “his” slaves. He is their “father,” they are his “children,” and thus he is “responsible” for them. Capitalism decreases the power over the entire life of human beings to a power over their time and labor, and at the same time abolishes the paternal “responsibility” with which slave-masters were charged. Since time and labor are the mo qualities with which a human being shapes his destiny, the servitude of a man who has alienated these qualities to another is just as real as that of a slave or a serf. However, the capitalist does not view his employes as “children” but as “hands,” and by thus degrading men from sub-humans into things, he does not feel in any way “responsible” for them: he can break, fire, and replace them at will. Thus the existence of a large number of “unemployed,” of men who are outside the boundaries of the economy, is of no concern to capitalists. Unlike the slave society, the capitalist society gives men a choice of masters whom they can serve. The choice is obviously limited to the “openings” available at any given time. But if a man should choose not to serve any master, nor to be a master himself, he is free to starve.

For those who refuse servitude, and for those who cannot find it, capitalism provides a vicious institution, unknown in any slave society: the institution of Unemployment. In the capitalist economy, there must always be a surplus of labor, since a shortage of labor would make workers too powerful in a strike, too insistent in their demands for a greater share of the wealth, and too curious about the necessity of retaining unproductive capitalists whose only function is to suck up the fruit of other men’s labor. Thus there are always some who are unemployed—who do not want or cannot find capitalists to serve. Since the capitalist society inculcates in all men the desire to serve, the great majority of the “unemployed” are men who crave for employment and are deprived of it by a shortage of “openings.” And for this they are criminals. Perhaps the most instructive short course on capitalism is that which is given very day in the courts of big cities where men are tried for petty crimes and “disorderly conduct.” In such a court, one miserable wretch after another is dragged in—one for vagrancy, another for drinking to forget his hunger and misery, another for sleeping on a park bench. The first count against the man who slept on the bench is that he has no address, no home to which to return; the second count, that he has no job, no “gainful employment;” and the third count against him is that, due to his lack of means, he slept on the park bench. If he is a “repeated offender” he is sent to the “work house” for a period of forced labor. He is then released as poor and miserable as before, and in time picked up again for “disorderly conduct.” “Therefore, that one covetous and unsatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own ... they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers and young babes. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a-work, though they never so willingly offer themselves thereto.”[171] The misfits of capitalism are criminals; they are condemned for being unemployed; the victims are themselves charged for the misery the capitalist society inflicts on them. The “unemployed” of the capitalist society are not slaves; they are stray animals.

The “restriction of monopolies” Jefferson had advocated is still given lip-service in the United States, in the form of anti-trust legislation and “free enterprise” propaganda, but in practice it is utterly discarded. If the salesmen of corporations are taught to claim they are “individual free enterprisers,” their status as servants is not thereby changed. Government does not restrict but magnifies monopolies. Both Law and the Officers of the Law are charged with the maintenance and protection of corporate property, not the maintenance and protection of human life and wellbeing. Law, which means institutionalized violence, protects the fortunate from the deprived. “They will borrow for the nation, that they may lend. They will offer lenders great profits, that they may share in them. As grievances gradually excite national discontent, they will fix the yoke more securely, by making it gradually heavier. And they will finally avow and maintain their corruption, by establishing an irresistible standing army, not to defend the nation, but to defend a system for plundering the nation.”[172] Those who gain from the plunder acquire a monopoly over the means of violence and the threat of violence embodied in Law, and they henceforth employ violence and law to defend their plunder. In the New World, as in the old, men are again instruments of the law, not law the instrument of men. The practitioners ofthe law, the magistrates of capitalism, must believe, as a requisite for acceptance in their profession, that a state of affairs there law is the instrument of all men constitutes “chaos” and “anarchy.”

Thus the first and foremost requirement for a democratic society does not exist in the land that calls itself the world’s defender of Democracy, Freedom and Justice. It is a society of privilege, where law condones the enrichment of some at the expense of others, and then protects the riches thus acquired. It is a society of masters and servants that does not greatly differ from previous forms of such an arrangement, except that the degree of inequality is greater and the “responsibility” of masters toward servants smaller. The far-sighted John Taylor had clearly perceived that the aristocracy of wealth is no mild successor to the aristocracy of title and superstition. The new system is a far more efficient and far deadlier method of enslaving men than any previous aristocracy. “A nation exposed to a paroxysm of conquering rage, has infinitely the advantage of one, subjected to this aristocratical system. One is local and temporary; the other is spread by law and perpetual. One is an open robber, who warns you to defend yourself; the other a sly thief, who empties your pockets under a pretense of paying your debts. One is a pestilence, which will end of itself; the other a climate deadly to liberty.

“After an invasion, suspended rights may be resumed, ruined cities rebuilt, and past cruelties forgotten; but in the oppressions of the aristocracy of paper and patronage, there can be no respite; so long as there is any thing to get, it cannot be glutted with wealth; so long as there is any thing to fear, it cannot be glutted with power; other tyrants die; this is immortal.

“A conqueror may have clemency; he may be generous; at least he is vain, and may be softened by flattery. But a system founded in evil moral qualities, is insensible to human virtues and passions, incapable of remorse, guided constantly by the principles which created it, and acts by the iron instruments, law, armies and tax gatherers. With what prospect of success, reader, could you address the clemency, generosity or vanity of the system of paper and patronage? Wherefore has no one tried this hopeless experiment? Because clemency, generosity and vanity, are not among the moral qualities which constitute the character of an evil moral system.

“The only two modes extant of enslaving nations, are those of armies and the system of paper and patronage.”[173]

The respectable eighteenth century plantation owner from Caroline County, Virginia, as well as his famous friend Thomas Jefferson, would doubdess be “investigated,” maligned and ruined as “atheistic Marxist communist conspirators” by present day American Congressmen. Taylor’s book was published four years before the birth of Karl Marx. And over four centuries ago, a man who was sanctified in 1935 but beheaded in 1535 had written, “wheresoever possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may justly be governed and prosperously flourish.”[174]

***

Jefferson and the early American liberals had hoped that, with a parliament, a bill of rights, elections, and universal education, the capitalist interlude would be temporary, the American people would gradually unseat the aristocracy of wealth, and the democratic experiment would continue. But Jefferson and the liberals didn’t show’ as much discernment as was shown by Thomas More three centuries earlier. Among the liberal democrats, only John Taylor had seen clearly that neither parliament, nor bill of rights, nor elections, nor universal education, could function for democratic ends once they fell to an aristocracy of paper and patronage. “A government, a section of it, or a measure, founded in an evil moral principle, such as fraud, ambition, avarice or superstition, must produce correspondent effects, and defeat the end of government... It is the same thing to a nation whether it is subjected to the will of a minority, by superstition, conquest, or patronage and paper. Whether this end is generated by errour, by force, or by fraud, the interest of the nation is invariably sacrificed to the interest of the minority.”[175] As soon as “the few” acquire a monopoly of wealth, power and privilege, then education, communication, and participation, the three instruments by which men were to maintain democratic justice once established, became converted into instruments by which “the mass of mankind” are enthralled to wealth, power, and privilege.

Ignorant men are the instruments of those who have the power and will to manipulate ignorance. Democrats once dreamed of preventing such manipulation in America by means of a program of education which would give each man a broad understanding of his relations to his fellow men, his society and his age, as well as an insight into the possibilities of human development. C. Wright Mills has lucidly summarized the goals and content of democratic education: “...to assist in the birth among a group of people of those cultural and political and technical sensibilities which would make them genuine members of a genuinely liberal public, this is at once a training in skills and an education of values. It includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of self; it includes the imparting of all those skills of controversy with one’s self, which we call thinking and with others, which we call debate. And the end product of such liberal education of sensibilities is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man or woman.

“The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society....

“It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educated man, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into the terms of their human meaning for the individual.... In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be: to keep the public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed...”[176] Without such a program, men will be overwhelmed. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”[177]

The most common type of ignorance is trained ignorance. And in the society ruled by the aristocracy of paper and patronage, educadon, the prime instrument for human enlightenment and liberation, becomes a highly refined method of inculcating delusions. The intelligent public is replaced by the ignorant mass. Instead of being taught to understand their relations to their situation, men are nurtured on far fetched delusions and disciplined in minute techniques. The result is a society where men have infinite knowledge about an infinitesimal task which other men cannot understand, and vague, meaningless platitudes about the problems and concerns men have in common. The result is a mass society where each silently fulfills his appointed task with utmost precision, but cannot understand his task, cannot control it, and cannot communicate this fact to other men. The result is a rationally created society in which reason and thought are superfluous and irrelevant— as superfluous as would be ideas and thought in animals who could not communicate them or in any way indicate they had them. In this process of “massification” men become something less than human: they become objects: their only specifically human possession becomes the mass thought, the mass delusion. “Right you are if you think you are,” wrote the playwright Luigi Pirandello. This doctrine has become the central principle of American pedagogy. Each person is brought up on a false image of the American society, an image in which political activity is in the hands of independent and responsible elected officials, and the economy is in the hands of small enterprising businessmen. The image does not describe anything with which people are familiar, yet the image cannot be challenged. For an oil worker whose machines and tools are so immediate and real, the corporations and the profits are hard to grasp and best forgotten; surely if multi-billion dollar corporations and rich men whose profits come in millions really existed, this fact would have been mentioned in the schoolbooks, it would appear in the newspapers. For a student of economics who confronts books that consistently draw the same finely-detailed picture and professors who consistently expound the same reality there can only be one image; could sections of libraries and faculties of teachers all be devoted to describing what has never existed? The inhabitants of the corporate society could neither justify nor defend the corporate society because they do not know they live in it. The image does not correspond to any society, and has nothing to do with corporate capitalism. The image is based on what Marx called a false consciousness.

Within Pirandello’s moral framework, a false consciousness is everyone’s privilege, provided the delusion is one’s own. However, in the corporate mass society, a private false consciousness is still as unrespectable as it was in Pirandello’s day. Psychotics are still taken to institutions, and efforts are still made to “correct” their mental image so it will correspond with a popularly accepted “reality.” Unlike Pirandellian delusions, the ideology of the corporate society is not a self-induced private delusion. It is a socially induced mass delusion. The consciousness of the American Masses is a systematically manipulated consciousness. The manipulation of the human mind is a technique that Hitler learned from the United States—he was an avid student of American “education” by means of Advertising and Public Relations. It is this manipulation of consciousness, the training of the human mind and spirit into one system of ideas and desires, that converts people into “masses.”

The corporate society is again a society of aristocrats who waste other men’s labor on elaborate, tasteless monuments to their wealth, on vast hierarchies of filing experts and servile parasites, on the biggest and ugliest arsenal of death-weapons in human history. It is again a society of soldiers whose sole function is to murder and destroy what other men build. It is again a society of priests. Winstanley had once urged that priests be turned to schoolmasters, that they teach men about the world they live in, about human history, about the laws and diversity of nature. But in the corporate society, the schoolmasters are priests again, and they again “make sermons to please the sickly minds of ignorant peoples, to preserve their own riches and esteem among a charmed, befooled, and besotted people.”[178] Men’s relations to their fellows, their society, their age, are again covered by impenetrable mist, and men are drilled in blind faith, political incompetence, and vocational expertize. The program that was to “produce the disciplined and informed mind that cannot be overwhelmed” is replaced by a systematic rape of the human mind designed to yield pliant, obedient “employes” who are “good citizens” when they know their “place.” The liberating education envisaged by democrats was not given a chance in the United States. As C. Wright Mills points out, “the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public’s expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.”[179]

The democratic liberals who hoped that education might in time liberate men from the aristocracy of paper and patronage were not very discerning. If an educational program is implemented and paid for by capitalists, it will reflect the interests of capitalists. It is not to the interest of an aristocracy of wealth to let men be taught independence of mind, for such teaching would undermine men’s adherence to a system which treats the earth and its inhabitants as the “private property” of a few; such teaching might lead men to realize that “private property” is not a law of nature but a human convention, and as a convention it can be overthrown. Capitalists are not interested in a nation of men who “cannot be overwhelmed;” they are interested in “employing,” in using materials and men in order to accumulate private wealth. An educational system supported by “employers” will be designed to yield employable men. The content of such a program will be loyalty, obedience, and vocational training. Men who are disciplined in political incompetence and vocational proficiency can hardly be expected to reject their masters and continue a long forgotten democratic experiment.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of American “education” is the incredible success with which it has equated vocational senility, political ignorance and nationalist loyalty. The “finished product” of this educational factory is a man who ardently believes that servility is freedom, ignorance is strength, war is peace, and capitalism is democracy. As an article in Monthly Review remarked, “all these blubbering protestations of love for democracy, and all this trembling solicitude for her safety and happiness, would seem to be die perfect strategy for those who are determined to perpetuate capitalism but who presently prefer to perpetuate it under cover of a ready-made national delusion that Free Enterprise, the American Way, Our Way of Life, Democracy are all one and the same thing—inseparable, indistinguishable, and indissoluble.

“It’s amusing how most apologists for capitalism shy around the use of the word in public; almost invariably they draw on their stock of shopworn and phony euphemisms. The stock itself has become a glutinous nationalistic complex in which the phrase, “Our Way of Life,” is designed to carry tender undertones suggesting memories of Home, Mother, Santa Claus, the Family Bible, Thanksgiving Turkey, the 01’ Smimmin’ Hole, and those fondly-remembered freedoms of barefoot boyhood. [Thus the] wide-spread delusion among the masses of the people that we already have democracy in this country—even a surplus for export to the backward nations.”[180]

The systematic inculcation of the grand nationalistic delusion which hides the corporate reality is not confined to the “ordinary man” nor to the “lower schools.” The Ivory Towers of American “higher education” have become as divorced from the western humanist tradition as the “lower schools.” Harvey O’Connor has described some of the Savants who rule over American Higher Education. “While Columbia’s loss of its president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was the oil industry’s gain when he campaigned against federal ownership of the offshore oil land, the great university lost little in its understanding of the industry’s problems. Eisenhower was succeeded by Dr. Grayson Kirk, a director of Soconv-Vacuum. Dr. Kirk announced, after his elevation, that he saw no incompatibility in holding the two posts. Soon thereafter Courtney C. Brown, in charge of Standard of New Jersey’s higher public relations, was named dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business.”[181] And to make doubly sure that students don’t become too curious about the details of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption, the corporations support about a fourth of university research, most of the rest being supported by the military. That is, the corporations get the credit for supporting university research. Actually almost all of the funds they “give” are tax deductible.[182] The effect is that tax-payers support the research, while corporations get the power to dictate, overtly or subtly, the purpose and direction of the research. Academic Freedom Week is yearly celebrated on American campuses. Whatever may have been the noble or ignoble purposes of universities in other times and places, American universities are for the training of corporation managers, military experts, mind manipulators. And when literature professors train the attention of their students away from the content of a literary work to its form, and philosophy professors teach that the analysis of man’s world must be replaced by the analysis of man’s words, they too join the Americanist bandwagon and effectively prevent any message from entering the student’s consciousness which will conflict with the corporate message.

The consequence is that clarity of thought and power of imagination are not among the strong points of a United States-educated man. The intellect-technicians, the so-called “intellectuals” of America, experts of a minute fragment of a “field,” are ignorant of all other “fields” as well as of the interrelations and values of the “fields”; yet at the same time these intellect-technicians are condescendingly cynical of thought which relates man to a larger structure than the fragment of a “field.” With a cynicism grounded on ignorance and barely masking a desire to conform to the prevalent ideology, the intellect-technicians can guard their positions only with contempt and defend their positions only with stereotypes. The “literary men” derive superiority by dismissing with contempt the engineers and manual workers who do not know the date of Marlowe’s death, and they dismiss socially relevant art by stereotyping it “sociology”—and “sociology,” to these latter day “literary experts,” has the same connotations that “diabolism” had for a medieval priest. “Sociologists” react in kind, by dismissing any studies which go beyond the statistical tabulation of the reactions of 5723 farmers to a manure pile in Northern Michigan as “art, not science.” The “political scientist” is expert in converting political problems into administrative problems and adept at treating human beings as material for corporate management. The “architect” is an expert in the maximization of returns and the minimization of costs, and to him the proposition that buildings are for human beings to live and work in is as exotic and irrelevant as the claim that there are cows on the moon. Each is an expert in his field and an ignoramus in the human consequences of his “field.” American physicists who pliantly let themselves be used for the manufacture of weapons of genocide have shamelessly advertised the inhuman logic of expertize: ‘Since we are experts in the arts of annihilation, and baboons in the arts of life, we will devote ourselves to the creation of genocidal weapons, and will leave the consequences to those who are in the fields that have to do with the preservation of life.’ Unfortunately, there are no “fields” that have to do with human life, because such activity would have to transcend all “fields,” and in the corporate society the only activity that transcends all “fields” is the accumulation of profits by the corporate masters. Life is not the goal but the victim of capitalism. A satirical portrait of experts, which H. G. Wells, half a century ago, located on the moon, is unfortunately no longer satirical, nor is it on the moon. The Selenites differ little, and then mainly in appearance, from the all-too-fainiliar present day “men” below the moon. “In the Moon, every citizen knows his place. He is bom to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose behind it. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end. They check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage his mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill. His brain grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain the essential part of him.... His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and seem to suck all life and vigor from the rest of his frame. His limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere stridulation for the stating of formulas; he seems deaf to all but properly enunciated problems. The faculty of laughter, save for the sudden discovery of some paradox, is lost to him; his deepest emotion is the evolution of a novel computation.…

“Or, again, a Selenite appointed to be a minder of mooncalves is from his earliest years induced to think and live mooncalf, to find his pleasure in mooncalf lore, his exercise in their tending and pursuit.... And so it is with all sorts and conditions of Selenites—each a perfect unity in a world machine.…

“They differed in shape, they differed in size, they rang all the horrible changes on the theme of Selenite form. Some bulged and overhung, some ran about among the feet of their fellows. All of them had a grotesque and disquieting suggestion of an insect that has somehow contrived to mock humanity; but all seemed to present an incredible exaggeration of some particular feature...”[183]

If radicals once dreamed that education would liberate men by giving them an insight into the potentialities of human development and social organization, this is once more the dream of radicals. Education is used to train men to serve a society that does not serve human ends. For men indoctrinated into Our Way of Life, there are no potentialities beyond the obedient compliance to corporation demands. For men who surrender their minds, time and labor to the genocidal arsenal that calls itself the Guardian of Human Dignity, there can be neither ideals nor potentialities; the metaphysical outer boundaries of their world are profit, production, and marketing. Human ideals cannot be served by the pursuit of an inhuman end that leaves a train of distorted sub-human victims behind lofty proclamations.

***

The New World did not become known either for its equality or its education, either for its Justice or its Knowledge. The democratic program of ongoing agrarian reform which was to bring all men equality, power and influence, was replaced by a moneyed aristocracy with a greater concentration of wealth, power and influence than had been held by any previous aristocracy. The democratic program of education was to give men insight and understanding of the society into which they are bom and did not make, and thus to give men knowledge of the means by which they can change their society and, if they find it unacceptable, “to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”[184] But instead, education was fitted to the needs, not of society, but of the aristocracy, and men were “educated” to be loyal and diligent servants of capitalist “bosses.”

The liberal democrats of 1788 had swallowed their objections to the Constitution when they were promised a bill of rights. The Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution, and is still there. On this Bill, which was added as an afterthought by security-holders anxious to collect their fortunes, rests the entire case of American “civil liberties.” And yet, if there is no social justice, if men are neither taught the meaning of human equality nor educated in the means of instituting it, such a bill of rights can never be more than an afterthought.

The first amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”[185] But Congress need make no law respecting or prohibiting any of these things if the aristocracy of paper and patronage exerts a prohibitive control over them. Thus only one pan of the first Amendment was realized, and that was the provision for the “free exercise” of religion or irreligion. And this is undoubtedly a great acliievement—for the eighteenth century. There have been no religious wars in the United States, nor mass persecutions of religious minorities. However, the nineteenth century saw no more religious wars were in Europe either, for by that time the type of religious intolerance for which Europe will forever be remembered had, by and large, declined (until the twentieth century revival of religious persecution in Nazi Germany). American achievements in official religious tolerance should not be underestimated, but the unofficial survival of American religious bigotry should not be forgotten. What is more, the hatred was not removed but transferred: the racial bigotry’ of Americans, legalized in many states, has been surpassed only by the barbarians of Nazi Germany and the European marauders of Africa.

It was the provision for untrammeled communication, written into the Bill of Rights as freedom of speech and of the press, that gave hope to the democrats and promise to America. Even if security-holders constituted the government, even if education was controlled by the rich, could not an atmosphere of free discussion unseat the aristocrats in power and enable the democratic experiment to continue? Jefferson expressed such a hope. “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, which we trust will end in establishing the fact that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found is the freedom of the press.”[186] However, if “the avenues of truth” are clogged, if the public is uneducated, or rather dis-educated into ignorance, mediocrity and servility, as well as uninformed or misinformed by the press, then the democratic experiment cannot continue, for there will be no democratic public to effect it. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”[187]

To eighteenth century democrats, freedom of speech and of the press meant that all the “avenues of truth,” the media of communication, would be free—open and available—to all men; not “free” for some and closed to others. Clearly, a press that is “free” only for those who have the power to control it is not a free press. The kings and tyrants of Europe, the wealthy noblemen of England, the Czars of Russia, had always been “free” to express themselves as they saw fit. But if the press is open only to the apologists for Czarist oppression, and closed to those who want to abolish Czarist oppression, it is not a free press—it is precisely the clogged type of press the democratic experiment was to abolish from the American continent.

Democrats rejected the species of communication where a few men speak and the rest merely listen. Democracy meant that each would have access to the ears of all. Each man’s written thoughts would be as prominently distributed and as widely available as any other man’s. The press would be open to every man who could express himself truthfully and coherently. To be available to all, the press must be supported by all. And if the press is socially supported, this means that no man and no group of men can have monopoly over it. If the press is socially supported and freely available to all, it obviously cannot be bought. If the press can be bought, it will be bought by those who can best afford to buy it, and will be most readily available to those who have a lot of money; such a press will not be equally available to all men.

Where there’s freedom of speech and freedom of the press, there cannot be “dangerous ideas.” There can be imaginative and unimaginative, original and trite ideas, but no “dangerous” ones. The advocacy of public sabotage, misery and oppression for the sake of private aggrandizement and power is dangerous, but it is not an idea. In a democratic society, the man who advocates personal gain at public expense would be greeted as a lunatic, since he expresses, not reasoned conclusions, but an irrational will to dominate over and enthralled other men—such a man expresses the type of irrationalism which twentieth century Freudian Psychoanalysts are frantically trying to justify. Fraud, slander and deception are not ideas, and a well-informed, well-educated democratic society had best greet them with indifference. Excessive punishment of the perpetrators of fraud and deception invariably does more harm than good, since punishment is next of kin to oppression, and once the spreading circle of oppression is irjven a foothold, it swells like a cancer and overruns all of a society’s institutions. Fraud and deception thrive on ignorance; to cope with them, a democratic society would seek, not to repress fraud and deception, but to abolish ignorance. Clearly the maintenance of a healthy body, not the endless consumption of medicines, is the best way to prevent disease. In a democratic society, a truthful and original idea well expressed cannot be “dangerous.” At the outer limit, it can be unpopular. But an unpopular idea, if it has value, will quickly gain popularity, and when it gains popularity and approval, a democratic public will experiment with it and enact it. Democrats envisioned a society where men would continually experiment with social arrangements and institutions in order to fulfill the needs of the human being and enlarge his intellect, imagination and understanding. The limits beyond which the experiment could not trespass were “certain unalienable rights” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”[188] In an undemocratic society, the problems of a democratic society seem insurmountable, and the ideals unattainable. To a blind man, it is hard to grasp that others can see. In an undeveloped society beridden with poverty and hunger, the elimination of disease appears to be an insurmountable problem; there are difficulties at every turn; each solution reveals new problems; each victory is accompanied by countless defeats. Yet in a society where poverty and hunger are on the way to being abolished, many of the “insurmountable problems” disappear; men suddenly find that the maintenance of cleanliness is not impossible; the elimination of disease suddenly seems a reasonable expectation. To shed ideals because they seem “unattainable” is cowardly; to condemn the abolition of disease because its problems seem “insurmountable” is to offer apologies for those interested in maintaining disease. Perhaps perfect physical and social health of human beings will never be attained, but perfection is merely a guide, not a state of affairs; perfection is a standard, a measure by which directions and tendencies can be judged. One who gives up a problem because of its difficulties, instead of seeking the causes of the difficulties, is a coward. Human physical health will not be approached, and the abolition of disease will seem “insurmountable,” so long as poverty and hunger exist. Social justice, honesty and knowledge will seem “unattainable,” so long as privilege and inequality exist.

A press cannot at the same time be a Business; a free press would be a social function socially supported, as free as air to every individual. If wealthy and powerful men control the press, and if wealth is required for access to it, then a free press cannot exist. Whatever their personal virtues, the members of a group will judge ideas in terms of their own interests. They will judge “good” those ideas which are favorable to their interest, and “bad” those ideas which are antagonistic to their interest. What’s more, if ideas threaten to abolish their interest on the ground that it is oppressive to other men, the men in control will always judge such ideas “uninteresting” and often “dangerous.” If thieves supported and ran a press, they would not encourage writings that exposed theft; they would lack interest in writings that condemned theft; they would suppress as “dangerous” writings that urged the abolition of theft. If the press is owned and controlled by one class of men, it cannot be a free press. The virtues of the men who control it are irrelevant. If one group of men acquired a monopoly over the world’s air, bottled it, and sold it to the world’s inhabitants, air would not be free, no matter how “good” or how “evil” the men who controlled it. A press that is not socially supported and as easily available to all men as air, is not a free press.

Yet the phenomenon that calls itself a “free press” in the United States is neither supported nor run by society, nor is it available to all men. Newspapers, publishing houses, printing establishments are not social functions in the United States; they are all “privately owned.” In other words, the press is the “private property” of businessmen, and it is run for financial profit. The bulk of support of American newspapers comes from advertising. Poor men don’t advertise. Only the rich advertise. The biggest and wealthiest corporations have the greatest wealth and power to advertise. Advertisement supports the newspaper. If the newspaper publishes ideas unfavorable to corporations, the corporations will not support it. Such papers will die. The only papers that survive will be those that are favorable to the rich men who support them. But this is not a free press. The rich constitute only a fragment of the population. A press supported by an aristocracy of wealth is no more “free” than a press supported by a king, a czar, or an aristocracy of title and superstition. Nor is the United States press equally available to all men. The rich man who owns a newspaper has the power to hire his own staff. Only a very unusual rich man will pick men whose important ideas differ from his own; only a very unusual hired man will dare to disagree significantly with his employer’s ideas. The outcome will be that the owner and his staff will provide readers with the same system of ideas. Such a newspaper is a corporation; and the interests of the newspaper owners are the same as the interests of the owners of other corporations. The rich men who own the newspapers express themselves through the editorial columns; they set the policy, the “line”; they limit the range of ideas expressed in their newspapers; they define the purposes, the goals, of the press. The readers of such newspapers will get an undiluted view of how the rich interpret the world: ideas antagonistic to the corporate aristocracy of wealth will be suppressed: they will be relegated to the “little magazines” which are not widely distributed, are not prominently displayed, are not readily available to all men, are at times totally unavailable to most men. The United States press is the press of the rich, and though the rich differ from each other on many topics, from grasshoppers to plays, there are many things they all hold in common, among which are the sanctity of private property, the obligation of debts, the inviolability of wealth and privilege, the necessity to suppress insurrections, and “the imprudence of democracy...”[189]

An excellent illustration of the workings of the American “free press” is an article written by Leo Huberman in the New York Daily Compass on May 5, 1952. In the article, Huberman quoted a renowned nineteenth century newspaperman, John Swinton, who “had been managing editor of the New York Times and assistant editor of the New York Sun under Charles A. Dana; from 1883 to 1887 he published his own paper.”[190] Huberman quoted a statement Swinton made to a group of editors at a banquet in his honor. The nineteenth century editor and publisher told his fellow editors: “There is no such thing in America as an Independent press, unless it is in the country towns.

“You know and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

“I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

“The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread.

“You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an ‘Independent Press.’

“We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

The Daily Compass, the newspaper in which Huberman’s article was published in 1952, no longer exists. It “died” shortly after Huberman’s article appeared in it. The Daily Compass had hired radical democrats, socialists, liberals, and other independent-minded writers, manv of them antagonistic to the society of corporate wealth, and it had allowed the men to express themselves. But the Daily Compass did not get support from the corporate rich whose plunder many of its writers attacked; it did not get the required Advertisements. Huberman wrote a sad prediction of the Daily Compass’ collapse in the same article. “Our highly-praised freedom of the press... means freedom for very rich men to own newspapers and give the public a picture of the world through their eyes, the eyes of Big Business. No law makes the press unfree in the United States. None is needed. Working men haven’t the money to buy and run daily newspapers. Rich people have. Therefore the news we get is slanted, distorted, suppressed—against the poor and for the rich.”

A newspaper with a staff that runs against the grain of the corporate aristocracy must seek support from that very aristocracy in order to survive. To express themselves in the United States, men who are opposed to wealth and privilege must seek aid from a wealthy man who betrays the interests of his own class. Poor men—workers, students, intellectuals, artists—cannot possibly support a newspaper as well equipped and staffed, as widely circulated, as prominently displayed, as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, etc. The fact that there have often been rich men in the United States who supported newspapers that analyzed and exposed wealth, privilege and property, does not mean that the United States press is free: it merely means that men whose ideas differ from the official line must, in order to express themselves, seek the patronage of rich men who betray the interests of their class. In the France of Louis XV, Voltaire and Rousseau had to seek the patronage of noblemen in order to have the leisure to write and the wealth to publish. But Louis XVs France is not known for its free press. The American revolution of 1776 could hardly have taken place if, to acquaint their fellow countrymen with their views, the American revolutionaries had needed to seek King George’s permission to publish their views, King George’s support to print them, and King George’s influence to distribute them.

In a democratic society, concrete and complete information would be so important that the dissemination of frauds, lies and deceptions would not be permitted. Scientists recognize such a principle in their own “field,” and they become justifiably indignant when someone “fakes” an experiment and sabotages years of study and research by supplying his fellow scientists with false and deceptive data. Yet outside their “fields,” American scientists are creatures of the corporate society: the wellbeing of physics, or chemistry, is far more important to them than the wellbeing of human life. The principle which scientists value so highly in their “fields” is flaunted in their society. Swinton told the editors, “I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with—others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things—and any of you who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.” Not only does the newspaperman in the corporate society suppress his own views. “The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon..,”[191]

In order to “lie outright, to pervert, to vilify” most effectively, a unique institution has been invented and highly refined in the United States: the institution of Advertising, supplemented by the so-called “Public Relations Field.” In advertising, self expression plays no role whatever, concrete information is withheld, complete information is suppressed. Advertising is a vast system of organized lying, perversion, villification, whose sole purpose is to sell the products of corporations by any means whatever. Corporations hire the advertizers to create in people the desire to buy the products the corporations make. In other words, the corporations themselves create the “needs” they fill. This type of plunder is unique in human history. The advertising man lies, deceives and defrauds in order to sell the products of his employer to a public that does not need them. The ad man and the public relations man do this for money; they are hired to deceive men for the financial gain of their employers. The ad man sells his imagination to the task of inventing slogans and his intellect to the task of defrauding men.

In the United States, the expenditure for advertising greatly exceeds the expenditure for education, for cultural and artistic ennoblement, for intellectual growth. According to an observer, “by 1951 the American people were spending $6,548 million a year on ads, a billion and a half more than on education. By 1956 the advertising expenditure reached about ten billion, and it now seems to he growing at the rate of around a billion a year.”[192] The obvious result is that “the good people of these colonies”[193] are thoroughly ignorant of the workings of the corporate world in which they live, but vastly informed on the “brand names” of the corporate products and gadgets. Some vivid illustrations are cited by Harvey O’Connor in The Empire of Oil. The book’s frontispiece quotes the New York Herald Tribune’s description of American economic ignorance, with specific reference to oil ignorance. “There is no country in the world which has the body of technical doctrine regarding petroleum in all its aspects which is possessed in the United States. There is no country which is so thoroughly geared to the power supplied by petroleum. Yet, thanks to the mixture of unsupported argument, official reticence and sheer hypocrisy which befog the subject, there can be few peoples so poorly informed of the global implicadons of oil production and distribution as the Americans.’’[194] This world-renowned American ignorance does not depict a low level of intelligence; it illustrates who owns and runs the instruments of communication, education, manipulation. Big corporations, like the oil companies, can buy the ideas and opinions of millions of men. As O’Connor points out, “Radio and TV are admirably attuned to the needs of such corporations. For one thing, there is no back talk from the listeners, and, at the moment of the broadcast, no competition for the listener’s ear or eye. As only those with millions can sponsor such programs, there is little likelihood of radio and TV listeners absorbing incorrect ideas. In the American way, the corporations foot the bill for the nation’s entertainment and information and can properly call the piper’s tune. Here there is little need to bow before the shibboleths of objectivity for it is frankly a commercial proposition, even if draped in terms of public service.”[195] The outcome is that, while “there can be few peoples so poorly informed of the global implications of oil production and distribution as the Americans,” there can be few peoples so well informed in the deceptions inculcated into them by the corporations’ advertizers. A small but significant illustration with reference to oil shows that though Americans may not believe their advertizers, they nevertheless follow like docile sheep the paths laid out for them. According to a Readers Digest article cited by O’Connor, Americans spend $200 million a year on “premium” and “Ethyl” gasolines which are advertised as “the best” on the ugly billboards that line the nation’s highways and despoil what is surely one of the world’s most varied and beautiful natural landscapes. Each citizen dutifully internalizes the message on the billboards; each can tell his neighbor many technical and philosophical reasons why “Ethyl” is “best.” And yet, “President Reese H. Taylor of Union Oil summarized the situation for his cohorts: we are steering clear of the rash of gasoline additives described everywhere in newspapers and on billboards. Our research boys gave all of these so-called wonder chemicals a thorough going- over. They find that the wear and tear on motors, the deterioration of valves, and so on, resulting from the use of such additive-fortified gasolines more than discounted the benefits, if any. We found there was no substitute for good gasoline.” Car owners obey the billboards and pay a great deal extra for the gas in the tank with the “tetraethyl lead.”And yet, “...According to the continuing survey of the DuPont company, main supplier of tetraethyl lead ... a third of the regular gasoline sampled had as much or more lead than the premium, and two samples of premium had no lead whatsoever!”[196]

This abysmal ignorance of human potentialities and social institutions, wedded to a fictitious knowledge of things, is clearly a revival of superstition on a grand scale—a superstition far deadlier than feudal religious superstition precisely because of its non-religious content and its inhuman purpose. The ad men create the “image” through which Americans see the world. The content of the “image” inculcates fear, hatred, envy, and a never-ending desire to buy the products peddled by the corporations.

The result is an ignorant, superstitious, manipulated population of docile men and women who spend their working hours making gadgets they have not chosen to make and do not control, and spend their leisure hours buying the gadgets and returning to their corporate masters the incomes they got for making the gadgets. This cycle of purposelessness and human irrelevance has its toll, for apparendy the creative intellect, the human imagination, the sense for truth, cannot be completely obliterated. The population of men whose humanity is suppressed is a population of anxiety-ridden men constantly seeking outlets for repressed passion, repressed imagination, repressed hatred. The advertizers are aware of this objecdess anxiety of the American people—and the advertizers have learned to manipulate the very fear and anxiety they have themselves so largely created for the purpose of serving their corporate employers yet more effectively. A typical report of an advertizers’ “Council” outlines a campaign in which the disease created and maintained by corporate advertising will be manipulated by corporate advertising. The Report reads:

“The rationale for the campaign was along the following lines. More people than ever seem to be suffering from an outraged sense of justice, a feeling of inadequacy, a delusion that the world is down on them and that they are trapped by their jobs, their marriage problems, their financial situation, etc. These emotional conflicts and frustrations are leading to both a conscious and an unconscious search for peace of mind.

“Some of the manifestations of this are evident in increased church attendance, in an unprecedented demand on professional psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, clergymen, marriage counselors and even in the sale of tranquilizer drugs.

“...people who go to psychiatrists for help, in most cases are not seeking any change in themselves, but rather are looking for comfort, reassurance and advice.

“That is one side of the climate in which [the product] must be sold.

“The other side, of course, is that a mass audience is more apt to be moved by cheerful promises than by pointing a finger, no matter how truthfully, at its problems, conflicts and sore spots.

“The human animal is basically happy. People acquire tensions. They learn fears—it isn’t part of their basic makeup. The prophets of doom complain that no one will listen to them. Why? Because no one wants to listen to them.

“Now, these two conflicting points of view in the average American’s makeup can be reconciled. The catalyst is humor— humor combined with a completely new promise about the benefits of [the product] in the idiom of today.

“Pursuing this total concept led naturally into an examination of the various conditions of tenseness to which all are subject from time to time…

“The list of such frustrations in the vernacular of everyday American living is practically inexhaustible....”[197]

The report also says that “nothing short of boldness could hope to penetrate the consciousness of the American public.”[198] And all this is for the sale of the almighty Product. To sell the products from which the corporate rich reap their fortunes, all the means that money can buy are used: psychologists, sociologists, educators, theologians, writers, philosophers. The appeal is made, not to understanding, but to emotions and fears; the advertizer’s aim is not to resolve, but to exploit for their maximum profit, the problems and tensions of human beings. Millennia of human thought, study, classification, analysis and discovery are here put to the service of multiplying the wealth of the rich. The drastic effect of advertising on intellectual and artistic activity has been pointed out by Leo Marx: “...perhaps the most subtle and elusive product of advertising is the attitude it engenders toward all activity of mind.

“In recent years Americans have speculated endlessly about the anti-intellectualism of our people, and about the apathy, confusion and alienation of youth. Yet it is a curious fact that in such discussions the influence of advertising, one of the most powerful value- creating instruments in world history, seldom is mentioned. Almost from infancy our children are exposed to the teachings of the ad man. He instructs them in the essential meaninglessness of all creations of mind: words, images, and ideas. The lesson is that they have no intrinsic importance, that they are merely instruments of manipulation. It is often said that, after all, advertising does no harm because no one really believes it. But of course that is precisely the point. In treating man as consumer we succeed in debasing what is most distinctively human.”[199] When the imagination becomes a means for selling goods, when ideas become cliches about merchandise, when art becomes illustration of “items” and brand names, then the human mind is thoroughly degraded, and becomes superfluous.

In the corporate society, the public is converted into a mass. The “people,” who were to control the press, have become its victims. The press is not merely unfree; it has ceased to be a means of communication, it is a means of mass manipulation. The degraded American “public” is not a democratic public. A mass of uninformed men bombarded with a fragmented world view, with only one organized theme cannot exert control over human affairs. A population of mis-educated men stormed with an infinite array of uninterpreted, irrelevant, sadistic detail designed to arouse desire and hatred, cannot possibly hold intelligent opinions on important public issues. Such a population does not rule, it does not constitute a “public”; it constitutes a mass—a controlled, systematically manipulated mass.

As advertising spreads, the ad-man mentality penetrates all facets of corporate life. The twentieth century American is not concerned with developing himself as a human being, but rather with “selling” himself. The time which other men spend enlarging their intellectual, artistic and imaginative faculties is spent by Americans in the acquisition of techniques of “self-selling.” The content and quality of a human being cease to matter; all that counts is the label, the clothes, the fake smile.

The most glaring, as well as the most drastic, place where the ad-man mind has penetrated is the American government. Armed with weapons that could instantaneously incinerate all living humanity as well as all man’s past achievements, the American government has become increasingly preoccupied with maintaining an “image” of competence and responsibility while pursuing an incompetent, irresponsible, and lunatic policy.

The official “image” depicts an America which is neither capitalist, nor corporate, nor hierarchic, and it is couched in terms that are familiar to the “average man.” The result is illustrated by a New York Times article describing a digest “jointly sponsored by Yale University and the Advertising Council”:

“That the American economy is uniquely dynamic, that it has produced the highest standards of living, more widely spread, than the world has ever seen before, that it has come closest to a democratic, classless society and that this has come about through a fantastic increase in productivity made possible through greater mechanization—all this is well known to Americans, even though often but dimly understood abroad. ‘People’s capitalism’ is increasingly used as a name for our economic system.”[200]

(In fact, the name “People’s Capitalism” is not “increasingly used” because the Advertising Council greatly overestimated its glamour. Using as a model the term “People’s Communism,” the Advertising Council neglected to find out how much of the world’s population supports “People’s Communism” not because of the glamourous sound of die words, but because of the quality of the dispensation, the degree of improvement in the human condition.) Since capitalists want neither to change their dispensation nor to legislate themselves out of existence, and since advertising experts are hired to juggle words and not to improve the reality underneath, they must continue to confine themselves to manipulating the Image. And the manipulation goes to fantastic lengths. During the Great Depression, the concept of “capitalist exploitation” was introduced into American thought by left-wing critics.

When the critics became respectable members of the New Deal administration, the term “exploitation” was dropped from the American vocabulary, and the System was known by the half-respectable title of “capitalism.” When the Nazi War broke out and the System had to be defended, “capitalism” was replaced by the ultra-respectable tide of “free enterprise.” During the whole period, the highest corporate capitalists had been steadily consolidating greater power and control over the government. When, after the war, corporation-men replaced purged left-wingers, “free enterprise” became simply “freedom,” and during the reign of John Foster Dulles, the capitalist countries as well as the feudal military dictatorships became “The Free World.” This process is known as “face-lifting.” Hitler’s Propaganda Minister could hardly have done better. By 1960 there was no more capitalism. Only Freedom. Capitalists were so impressed by this manipulation of words they thought that by giving capitalism the name “freedom” they had thereby made it attractive to all the world’s population. According to the New York Times,

“Fifty leading United States business men presented ... a ‘declaration of economic freedoms’ to offset Communist propaganda at the United Nations…

“The freedoms listed in the declaration were freedom of competitive private enterprise; choice of occupation; voluntary organization for private enterprise; contract; property ownership; freedom to produce, buy or sell; competition; trade; money, that is, a sound currency.”[201]

At the time of writing this book, Cuba was invaded. The ad-man deceptions by which the American people were “informed” of this invasion bore a lurid similarity to the Nazi German accounts of their “liberation” of Europe. For years the American “free press” had supplied its readers with barely a mention of the atrocities, the brutality, the misery in Cuba under the dictator Fulgencio Batista and his administration of sugar planters, hired killers, and gamblers. Americans knew nothing about the oppression entailed in the fact that American corporations owned and operated Cuban sugar, land, electricity, telephones, and indirectly, armed forces. When revolution swept across Cuba and gained increasing support until most of Cuba’s six million people were behind it, thus enabling it to rid Cuba of the planters’ regime and the powerful army by which Batista had ruled, the American people were given an “image” of a coup d’etat in which a few hundred men had “overthrown” a few hundred other men. When the Cuban revolutionary’ government made education and culture available to men who had never seen a book and gave land and work and food to men who had never before been able to think or work because they suffered from chronic hunger diseases, the American people were told by their “free press” that Cuba was “going Communist,” and they were shown pictures of sad, wealthy landowners whose innumerable acres of land had been given to thousands of landless peasants. And when the Cuban government expropriated the American corporations whose huge profits had come from the raw materials and the cheap labor of a few million starving Cubans, the American people were told the familiar atrocity stories about priests and nuns which constitute the American “reading public’s” knowledge of the non-capitalist part of the world. The American people were told virtually nothing of the reforms instituted by the Cuban revolution, of the housing, the education, the culture, the food which became available to Cubans—to some for the first time in their lives. They were told nothing of the enthusiasm of the Cuban people, of their revolution’s ideals, of their plans. The American press, which daily consumes entire forests, directed itself to the constant repetition of charges that the Cuban Government was Communist, that it was “extracontinental,” that it destroyed Inter-American Unity, that it undermined the Monroe Doctrine, and—when the “image” was “sold”—that it should be overthrown. When Cuba’s Foreign Minister charged, at the United Nations, that the United States Government’s Central Intelligence Agency was planning an invasion of Cuba, the press “explained” the charge to its readers as “outrageous,” and as nothing more than a part of “Cuba’s hate-America campaign.” Yet in mid-April 1961, Cuba was invaded. Now the American newspaper readers were told that “Cubans” were liberating Cuba from “Communist Terror.” At the same time, the American people were told that, though the United States Government had “sympathy” for the invaders, it was not giving them any aid; and they were also told that neither the United States nor any of its Latin American allies were allowing their territory to be used for the invasion: the “Cuban” invaders had presumably been holding their breaths under water off the Cuban shore while waiting for their chance to “liberate” Cuba. And then the American press, on the authority of the “Cuban Revolutionary Council,” reported in front page banner headlines a sequence of events that was to lead to the “liberation” of Cuba by the “Cuban Freedom Fighters.” The stories released to the press by the “Cuban Revolutionary Council” told that the Cuban people were about to rise against their government, they told that Cuban fliers had defected from the Cuban air force, they told of landings, and of victories. The day victory was to be proclaimed, the “liberators” were in the sea. The “Cuban Revolutionary Council” announced, and the press dutifully reported, that Fidel Castro had flown Russian Migs (fighter planes) and driven Russian tanks against the helpless “Freedom Fighters.” The invasion failed. And suddenly the American press, with a few significant exceptions, became piously silent about the “liberation” of Cuba. One of the exceptions was the New York Times, which continued to run articles on Cuba until the American President reminded a conference of important newspapermen that the publication of information embarrassing to the United States Government was not one of the tasks of the Free Press. The Times revealed, though not in banner headlines, that “As has been an open secret in Florida and Central America for months, the C.I.A. planned, coordinated and directed the operations that ended in the defeat on a beachhead in southern Cuba...”’[202] The “Cuban Revolutionary Council,” it turned out, had not been in charge of the invasion. “On the day the anti-Castro forces landed in Cuba members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council were kept incommunicado by the Central Intelligence Agency in an old house near Miami…

“The effect of not taking the Revolutionary Council leaders into confidence was to keep them from having any role in directing the landings...”[203] The reports supposedly issued by the “Cuban Revolutionary Council” about the landings, the fighting, the impending victory, the defections, the Russian Migs, had all come from the office of Lem Jones Associates, Inc., of Madison Avenue, New York—an advertising firm.[204] The invaders, it turned out, had not sprung from the sea, but from bases in Florida, in Louisiana, in Guatemala, and in United States-controlled Swann Islands in the Caribbean. The leading “Freedom Fighters” were those who regularly carry on the C.LA.’s world-wide cloak-and-dagger operations. “A Filipino guerrilla specialist was in charge of some of the training. He was assisted by five or six instructors who are believed to be Slavs, perhaps Ukrainians, and who were assisted by interpreters.”[205] The “defector” from the Cuban air force turned out to have flown an American plane with a Cuban insignia painted on it. “When... one of the pilots who landed in Miami described himself as a defector from the Cuban Air Force, his picture, published in local newspapers, was promptly identified here [in Miami] as that of a Lieutenant from the Guatemalan camp. He has vanished.”[206] And the “Russian Migs,” which filled Americans with fear, frenzy and hatred, turned out to be “United-States-built T-33 jets flown by the Castro pilots.”[207] By way of “explanation” of the furor raised by the front page scare-headlines about the Migs, the writer briefly commented: “It is thought that some of the insurgents, when surprised by these T-33 jets, believed they were Soviet-built Migs.”[208] The “free press” of the United States did not tell its readers that the source of its “facts” on the Cuban invasion was a Public Relations firm on Madison Avenue, New York. But the “free press” did tell the American people, repeatedly and emphatically, that the Cuban government had “betrayed” the Cuban revolution.

“Alas! is it true, that ages are necessary to understand, whilst a moment will suffice to invent, an imposture?”[209]

***

The eighteenth century intellectual rebels were the Founding Fathers of American rhetoric, but the eighteenth century capitalists were the Founding Fathers of American practice. In American practice, the “democratic” participation is restricted to the marking of a ballot every two or four years. On the ballot are the names of men he does not know and has not chosen. He “votes” on the basis of no issues whatsoever, because no issues are presented. C. Wright Mills has summarized a typical ceremony. “In the 472 Congressional elections of 1954, for example, no national issues were clearly presented, nor even local issues related clearly to them. Slogans and personal attacks on character, personality defects, and counter-charges and suspicions were all that the electorate could see or hear, and, as usual, many paid no attention at all. Each candidate tried to dishonor his opponent, who in turn tried to dishonor him. The outraged candidates seemed to make themselves the issue, and on that issue virtually all of them lost. The electorate saw no issues at all, and they too lost, although they did not know it.”[210] The candidate who succeeds is the one who can pay for the most lavish campaign and the cleverest advertising, who can best malign his opponent’s personal traits, and who will best fulfill the role of courier for the vested interests of the rich. “Estimates of the cost of the 1952 presidential campaign ranged all the way up to $100 million. Frank Edwards, the former AFL radio commentator, said that the oil interests contributed half that sum, and all to the Eisenhower forces. There was no way to contest the statement, for no one in authority cared to flash a beam into the dark recesses of corporate financing of political parties.”[211] The government “of the people” is quite openly a government of the corrupt and of the rich, yet it continues to call itself “democratic.” America is a land where a very small group of men participate in the making of important decisions, where very few men’s ideas carry weight and authority, where only the voice of the Celebrity is heard by All. “The people” have no greater participation in America’s polity than in America’s economy. “The top of modem American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully coordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”[212] The democratic rhetoric hides a corporate state. The government “of the people” is a government of the rich. The people are told that by “casting ballots” for the rich they are somehow defending “Freedom.” And the people acquiesce, and they thank the Founding Fathers, whose works they have not read, for having left them such a blessed political system.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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The New Freedom — Chapter 4 : Ideology and Manipulation

By Fredy Perlman (1961)

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Author : Fredy Perlman

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