Chapter 5

Corporate Dispensation

19611961

People :

Author : Fredy Perlman

Text :

The democratic ideal was an affirmation of human life. Democracy was to open for all men the possibility for creative development, imaginative exploration, experimental activity. Every man was to participate in the creation of the human community. Knowledge and technique need not have been put to the service of profits and slaughter. If taken up in a spirit that affirms human life, the sciences and technologies could be made to serve human ends. As Lewis Mumford has pointed out, “The ability to face one’s whole self, and to direct every part of it toward a more unified development, is one of the promises held forth by the advance both of objective science and subjective understanding.”[213] If put to the service of human development the science and technology which have come to the verge of annihilating mankind would enable men to “attempt enterprises that no civilization seeking mainly to exploit immediate economic advantages would entertain: launching projects and experiments whose outcome may await centuries.…

The margin of free time, free energy, and free vitality that modem man may command is so great that, instead of devoting most of his days to mere biological survival, he now has capacities for self-development that were once confined to a minuscule ruling class.”[214] In the democratic society, there would be science but no “experts,” technology but no “technicians”; there would be no narrow, undeveloped, incomplete persons who are imbecils outside their own specialty: “the fragmentary man would be replaced by the completely developed individual, one for whom different social functions are but alternative forms of activity. Men would fish, hunt, or engage in literary criticism without becoming professional fishermen, hunters, or critics” (Karl Marx). The completely developed individual would not allow the instruments of human growth to fall once again into the hands of those who would use them for human oppression; such an individual would also have the intellectual power to undertake “ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the powers that be.”[215] Giovanni Batista Vico long ago pointed out that man can understand and affect human history because it was made by man. On the same grounds, man can grasp all human knowledge because it is created by man. In a society which promotes wholeness and understanding, each individual would be able to do what any other can do. Thus each would be able to extend the frontiers of his own greatest interest, whether it is physics, poetry, or food preparation, and at the same time would understand, and participate in, the break-throughs of other frontiers. From early childhood on, men would participate in the important activities of the community, and thus would attach to them the naive curiosity and adventurous spirit which men reserve for the activities of childhood. There would be no “problem of leisure,” which plagues societies that thwart imagination and creative energy, and reduce human activity to repetition and drudgery. Simone Weil has observed[216] that farmers who have participated fully in the life of the farm from childhood on consider their work, and not the escape from work, the meaningful facet of their lives. To force a man to carry on for thirty years an activity he has mastered in two would be considered a crime in a human dispensation: a crime as ugly as murder, for it kills the potentialities and thwarts the growth of the individual.

But the corporate dispensation is a negation of human life: it thwarts development, prevents wholeness, and nurtures fragmented “experts” and “professionals.” Those who reject fragmentation are the outcasts of the corporate society. Yet the armies of incomplete men needed to support the corporate structure are at the same time its greatest danger: nurtured on ignorance, they are prey to a nihilist rejection of human life and a thirst for annihilation which, if allowed to erupt, will not exempt even the corporate masters.

The rich are the only beneficiaries of the corporate society. They are the Holders of all the projects, all the activity, all the rewards. The corporate society is their machine; it yields their profits. Contrary to their own claims, what the rich possess is not internal; it is not related to physique, or psyche, or intellect. The rich do not owe their wealth and prestige to themselves, but to their society and its institutions. In the excellent definition of C. Wright Mills, “the elite are simply those who have the most of what there is to have, which is generally held to include money, power, and prestige—as well as all the ways of life to which these lead. But the elite are not simply those who have the most, for they could not ‘have the most’ were it not for their positions in the great institutions. For such institutions are the necessary bases of power, of wealth, and of prestige, and at the same time, the chief means of exercising power, of acquiring and retaining wealth, and of cashing in the higher claims for prestige.

“By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it. No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, powerful. Higher politicians and key officials of government command such institutional power, so do admirals and generals, and so do the major owners and executives of the larger corporations.”[217] If the institutions rotted, or were abolished, the “elite” would not be elite; if they were eased to the bottom of their own market economy, the “elite” would probably be quite pathetic, since they would lack the training of other men to survive in such conditions. But such an eventuality is inconceivable to them, and since they stay by and large only among themselves, they are not fully aware that there is a bottom, they do not suspect that human beings live there, and they are not greatly concerned. Their world is a closed world; it is not a windowless world, but its windows look out only on lawns and beaches, not on slums. “They form a more or less compact social and psychological entity; they have become self-conscious members of a social class. People are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split, rather than merely a numerical scale, separating them from those who are not elite. They are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes. They accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike.”[218]

The rich are born to wealth; thus they take wealth for granted, and do not feel concerned with wealth. They are bom with their privileges, consequently they do not have to reach for privileges, and they can afford to look down on the “climbers” who do reach for privileges. Being themselves “well born,” they feel no solidarity with those who are not “well born”: they regard “the mass of mankind” with condescention and contempt. They do not identify with the goals or the problems of other men. Their own world, their “way of life,” is made for them: it exists independently of their goals or their efforts. “Every member of the dominant class is a man by divine right,” wrote Jean Paul Sartre. “Born into a society of leaders, he is convinced from childhood that he is born to command, and in a certain sense that is true, since his parents, who command, have engendered him to follow in their footsteps. There is a certain social function which awaits him in the future, into which he will slip as soon as he has come of age, and this function is something like the metaphysical reality of his person. And in his own eyes he is a person, that is, an a priori synthesis of fact and rights. Awaited by his peers, destined to take their place when the time comes, he exists because he has the right to exist....”[219]

The dominant minority of the rich consider themselves “the Nation.” Born to command, born to privilege, they see their own welfare as “the welfare of the nation”; they see the defense of their privileges as “national defense.” The welfare of others is a favor conferred by the rich. Other men do not have the right to exist: they are maintained, and kept happy, through the grace of their benevolent masters. And this grace must be repaid. The duty, the function of other men, is to maintain and protect the privileges of the rich. The ungrateful wretches who refuse must bear the consequences: they will not have jobs conferred on them, they will be unemployed, and to survive they will have to beg from their own lowly peers who are employed for the wages they turn down from the rich. Ungrateful or not, there must always be a certain minimum number of unemployed, between two and five million in the United States, for otherwise the employed would develop inflated conceptions of their own importance: they might become duped with ideas about the Welfare State, or worse. They might demand a greater share of wealth and privilege, and the rich know that “the mass of mankind” would only cut their own throats with greater leisure and wealth: they would not know what to do with it, and they’d commit suicide and increase the divorce rate. That’s bad. “The mass of mankind” had best be kept in place. For the masses, the highest virtues are obedience and patriotism: these are the two components of nationalism. The educational system must see to it that obedience and patriotism are internalized, and that men are good workers. The good citizen is the patriot who identifies his own interests with the interests of the rich, who sees his duty as the defense of the privileges of the rich. And, as in slave societies, the slave must be taught to get vicarious joy from his master’s Greatness and Power.

The corporate structure has irresponsibility built-in. Unlike other aristocracies, the dominant minority of corporate Holders do not have personal contact with those who serve them. This is the main psychological difference between the Holders of the corporate society and the earlier entrepreneurial capitalists. The entrepreneur was often the owner, the chief executive, as well as the employer. He was master over a relatively small number of men, and he was visible to them. The men knew he was the Boss: they were hired by him, supervised by him, reprimanded and fired by him. Or, in case there was a supervisor or a foreman, the men knew this was the second man, that he was the Boss acting by proxy. And the Boss had an equally clear view of his relation to “his men.” Such an entrepreneur knew, for example, that when one of his “hands” fell into a meat vat, this was an unfortunate consequence of “the business.” He may have greeted such an event with indifference, but the chain of responsibility was not hidden from him.

The corporate Shareholder, however, is completely removed from the activities of his corporation (or corporations, since most of the rich are Shareholders in many corporations, even “competing” ones). He has control over thousands of men, but is thoroughly unaware of his relation to them. This unawareness is built into the corporate structure itself.

The Shareholder’s money is invested for him by a high-priced specialist hired for that purpose. His corporation’s activities are supervised by Executives who are paid to do that. He does not employ his own men, since vast “personnel offices” exist for that purpose. He does not advocate or advertise his products, since he pays ad men for that. He does not talk to people about his corporations, but sends hired public relations men to represent him. His only concern is to apportion money to serve one purpose or another, and he can hire an “expert” to do even that for him. If he chooses, he does not have to know what his corporations make. That, too, is his Privilege. He can literally allow his money to “work” for him, and can maintain complete ignorance about what his money “does.” He may spend all his time traveling wherever he wants to go; he may collect art works, women, sport cars. He can “give” minute fractions of his wealth to Foundations, thus getting it tax-exempted and feeling like a humanitarian philanthropist devoted to “helping suffering humanity.” He can, if he likes, run for political office, and thus extend the dominion under his control: he has the means to represent “the mass of mankind” in the legislature: the means to pay the party boss; to finance the advertising campaign; to hire the “writers” in the public relations firms whose “releases” inform newspaper readers of his candidacy, his honesty, and his devotion to “democracy.”

The Holder lives in a world of privilege; he eats only the cream. He does not participate in the affairs of society. The corporation runs for his profit, but he does not design its product, does not produce it, does not distribute it, does not necessarily even consume it. The workers run for his profit, but he does not hire them, does not talk to them, does not share their concerns. Taught that all work is degrading, the Holder cannot imagine a state of affairs where work would be satisfying and ennobling. With absolute control over the projects of thousands of men, he is nevertheless deprived, by his ideology and his position, of the satisfaction that comes from the creation and carrying out of projects. His decisions are absolute, but they concern only money; he “sees” his corporations’ activities only in the form of a financial report. The implementation is delegated to many men, none of whom fully comprehend the entire project. Tied to the financial end of all his activities, he does not, and cannot, get the understanding or the fulfillment of making, of creating—yet by fragmenting projects among hired servants, he deprives others of the joy of creation.

The financial masters of the realm are many times removed from the consequences of their decisions; they do not implement the decisions they make, or those made in their name. If one suggested to a Holder, for example, that most of his wealth came from a corporation that manufactured equipment for weapons of genocide, he could become righteously indignant: he doesn’t have anything to do with genocide, he merely reads the “financial reports” prepared for him; he may not even read the “reports,” since his subordinates are trustworthy, devoted men, highly trained to spend their lives increasing his wealth. He can continue his travels undisturbed. And his subordinates are not responsible either; they’re merely hired to invest his money, and weapons happen to be the most profitable “item.” Thus the Holders aren’t responsible. And below the Holders, everyone is hired and no one is responsible. If an “accident” should take place, and if humanity should happen to be annihilated, no one will be responsible, no one will be to blame, no one will have caused anything. In fact, everyone will have been doing his best. The annihilation of mankind will not have been caused by a definite group of men, at a definite time, under definite circumstances, but rather, according to the Corporate Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the cataclysm will have been caused by Sin, and those responsible for it will be Collective Humanity: every human being who has ever lived anywhere will be equally responsible and equally guilty. Within the confines of the corporate structure, no solutions can be found—to anything.

Rich and removed, taking wealth and privilege for granted, the Holder feels no solidarity with other men. Any sense of obligation or responsibility is totally lacking. Men are not his brothers. He cannot feel equality towards “inferiors.” He does not live in a community. Humanity is a fictional concept to him. He does not believe in sharing, or in cooperation. If he agrees to a project, he will do his part only if it pleases him. He feels no more reason to discharge obligations or promises towards “inferiors” than men feel towards dogs. But he takes it for granted that his reign constitutes the best of all possible worlds, that “Men of great property are deeply interested in the welfare of the states 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.”[220] The rich also take it for granted that “the mass of mankind,” the hierarchy of hired servants, recognize and appreciate the superior wisdom, understanding, and benevolence of the dominant rich. However, according to George Bernard Shaw, the rich do not interpret correctly. “I he taste for spending one’s life in drudgery’ and never-ending pecuniary anxiety solely in order that certain idle and possibly vicious people may fleece you for their own amusement, is not so widespread as the papers would have us think.”[221]

“They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”[222]

Franz Kafka’s couriers carry many meanings into various realms and certainly they bring a glaring light into a corporate world where Holders are the hidden monarchs, Profits the aim of the realm, and Executives its most visible representatives. If the Holders get the privileges of the corporate society and the workers bear its physical brunt, the administrative couriers, besides being the society’s most conspicuous members, bear its full psychological impact.

The new men in the capitalist economy—variously known as White Collar Workers, Minor Executives, Managers, New Middle Class— thoroughly upset and threw into confusion the expectations of traditional socialists. The drive for monopoly which propels all capitalists was expected, in time, to lodge great wealth and power in the hands of a few capitalists. This much, in fact, took place: “Slightly more than half [of American Industry] is owned outright by not more than 200 corporations.”[223] However, it was expected that the property-less working class would grow larger and larger. In fact, the number of property- less men has increased. But it is not a working class. Seemingly out of nowhere, the White Collar men appeared on the scene, and before socialists could adjust their theories, these new men started to outnumber the workers. These men are property-less, they are often no better paid than workers, but they are not wage-workers, they do not produce anything, and they find solidarity not with each other, but with the corporations they serve. Even Karl Marx, the most far-seeing and imaginative of the founders of socialist theory, could diagnose only the coming of a monopoly capitalism where the greatest wealth would be concentrated in a few hands; his imagination was not cruel enough to visualize the plethora of lackeys who would be hired to preserve the higher privileges of their masters.

Every agrarian society has its officials and tax-collectors, even’ government its bureaucrats. In themselves they are not new. But a society where elaborate feudal hierarchies of bureaucrats exist to preserve and maximize the profits of private corporations—this is new. And the visibility of these people—the conspicuous roles which they play in every activity of the corporate society—this is new. In the past, kings displayed their military establishments but hid their bureaucrats. Farmers are never conspicuous; separated by patches of land, they are rarely seen in large numbers. Workers are crowded together, but hidden from public view by windowless factory walls. The factory owners are on their estates or recreational resorts set off from other men by fences marked KEEP OUT — PRIVATE PROPERTY — NO TRESPASSING. But in the cities, during the working day, the couriers are everywhere visible; they are the front of the corporate society; they are the department-store salesgirls, the door-to-door salesmen, the gas-station attendants, the bank clerks, office clerks, secretaries, higher secretaries, Managers, Supervisors, Directors, and entire schools of Assistants. In parts of New York City, there are banks on all four corners which have glass walls: inside, in full view of the thousands who pass daily, are the regimented rows of desks, each with its clerk. Skyscrapers with glass walls, gigantic rectangular filing cabinets in the “international style,” are built constandy in the Empire City. Inside each of the thousands and thousands of slots, behind a large pane of glass, there is a manager, with his desk and his secretary. Thus an illusion is created that bank clerks exert some control over “their” banks, or salesgirls over “their” department stores, or gas-station attendants over “their” oil corporations. The king does not make public appearances, whereas the couriers are always on display. Thus the inhabitants of the corporate society are under the illusion that the couriers, the White Collar people, control the corporate economy.

The administrative hierarchies are organized along military lines: they are pyramids where power is passed from the top down through an infinity of layers, which grow larger as they get lower. Each corporation has its own private hierarchy. However, unlike military armies, these hierarchies are composed of all officers and no soldiers. The actual top is invisible except to very special couriers, mostly lawyers. From the top down, each group has its rank, and each feels awe before the ranks above and contempt for those below. Next to the top are generally the Boards of Directors. These may be the Holders themselves, but generally they are glorified salaried-employes. These highest Directors may or may not hold stock in the corporation, they may or may not be independently rich, but some things they all do have in common: their one and only loyalty is toward the corporation, the only profits they work for are those of the corporation, the only wellbeing they know is the corporation’s. Whether the corporation deals with steel or oil or food, the Directors concern themselves only with money—with maximizing profits that are not their own. High up on the pyramid, they are nevertheless couriers, not kings. They set the pace and hold up the image for all those below. Various types of subchiefs, Executive Directors, are the tops of the pyramids at a corporation’s regional plants. The Executive Director is more visible than the Board. He generally has a local office. He is “benevolent” to those under him, but fearful of the Board. It is his task to implement locally the financial decisions of the Board. Hired and fired by the Board of Directors, the local Executive is die highest in the pyramid who has no view of the Holders.{5} From this point down, there are many couriers but no king. Immediately below the Executive Director, there is an intricate network of Assistant Directors, Associate Directors, Supervisors, Head Secretaries, Office Supervisors, and many, many other titles and sub-titles. The Office Supervisor is generally an efficient woman in middle-age, who is in charge of the secretaries, switch-board operators, typists, filing-cabinet experts, and filing cabinets. Generally prudish in her sexual habits, she finds her life’s greatest joy in a one-sided Platonic intimacy with her immediate superior, the Executive Director. To her, the Board is a complex system of unapproachable deities. She speaks of “The Board,” not as a group of human beings, but as an impersonal Thing that sits over and judges the affairs of her office. For her, the Holders no longer exist. The rich men at the top of her own corporation are as unreal to her as the rich men of any other corporation.

The ranking system effectively prevents any unity, any feeling of solidarity. With awe for the top and contempt for the bottom, the White Collar people envy their own peers, and are in constant anxiety lest one of their coworkers “rise” above and one of those below rise to their own level. The master-servant relationship is hidden from their view. Each group’s contact is limited to the rank immediately above, and that immediately below. The rest is shrouded in a deep fog. The top is above the clouds, the bottom below hell. The only solidarity, the only identification they feel, is toward the corporation they serve, but they do not know who controls the corporation, nor why.

Although they are as property-less as manual workers, the White Collar people do not make anything they neither produce nor create. They fill what are known as “Service Occupations.” Their “service,” as C. Wright Mills has summarized, consists of “handling” people and symbols. The symbols they handle are not those of the poet, but those of the filing-cabinet expert. Their relationship to the symbols is neither intellectual nor imaginative: it is a relationship of things to things, devoid of understanding, devoid of any human meaning. Trained animals or electronic machines could do their “work” much more efficiently, and the White Collar people know it: this knowledge is the basis of much of their frantic anxiety. Their relation to the objects of their world is a filing-cabinet relation. They sell articles they have not made. They file papers they do not understand. They answer letters they have not read. They file money they did not earn and will not get. They read forms in which they have no interest. They sit at the apex of uprootedness and alienation. Their frame of reference for understanding their relation to their work is the frame of reference of their particular filing cabinets. They live in a narrow one-dimensional world. The dimension is either alphabetical or numerical.

The Psychologists of the White Collar world fill their clients with an ideology of Interpersonal Relations precisely because the White Collar reality is completely alien to human relations. The Managerial and Secretarial people do not ever “relate” to human beings: they “handle” human beings. And their handling of people is modeled on their handling of things. People, in the administrative world, are merely another form of filing cards. If a man’s name starts with Z, he cannot be “interviewed” until after the As, Es, Cs.... The salesman boasts that he has “contacts” with thousands of people—yet he neither understands nor communicates with any of them, because understanding and communication are undefined concepts in the world of the “contact” and the “pitch.” The interviewer boasts that he “sees” hundreds of people every day, but he shares no dreams or goals or projects with them, because there are no projects in the White Collar world. A vast number of psychologists and analysts, equipped with a fictitious doctrine of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones which portrays the human mind as a bureaucracy, gain their wealth by tranquilizing the White Collar people. They tell their clients that “seeing” hundreds of people daily is an effective substitute for one true friendship, provided the clients swallow the “reality” of the Freudian doctrine. However, the tranquilizer is as spurious as the doctrine, and the lie does not effectively fill the emotional vacuum. In spite of all the psychological doublespeak, the White Collar people still suspect they are not fully human beings. Comradeship remains an alien notion in a world where men are objects to be classified or used. Communal sharing is a crime in a world where endless corporate appropriation is the only legitimate goal. Cooperative projects are impossible for men who have never initiated projects of their own, and who understand cooperation as a servile submission to mechanical routine. Under the ideology of Interpersonal Relations is a world of talk without communication, activity without human meaning, work without joy.

The White Collar hierarchies grow constantly; they are the front behind which every activity of the corporate society is carried on. The hierarchies are not restricted to Corporations. Government offices have always had their clerks. But today, labor unions are “administered” by clerks who are loyal only to their filing jobs, indifferent to the workers or their goals. Pre-university “education” has been effectively converted into a vast bureaucracy. All teachers must spend time at Teachers Colleges where they are taught how to administrate, not what to teach. The first result is that the imaginative spirits drop out to seek more adventurous pursuits, whereas the least intelligent and least independent receive their “teaching” licenses. The second result is that a vacuum exists in these people, the vacuum left by the knowledge they lack. While the “teachers” administrate, advertizers “educate” the students. The effect is a thorough indoctrination in the corporate ethic of profits and war. Even in the universities, teachers are being replaced at crucial spots by administrators. Thus even if a student has retained some intellectual curiosity and some imagination after a twelve-year Americanization through elementary’ and high school, he still hasn’t much of a chance to become an educated man. Freed from the high school administrators, he will anxiously go to the University Admissions Office to seek enlightenment about the world of knowledge. There an Assistant Director will “counsel” the expectant student on the philosophy courses he should take, though to this Director philosophy is merely another classification in the catalog; and the Director will advise the student about humanities, though this administrator’s only “humanities” are the sex-crimes of the newspapers and the higher pornography of Hollywood movies. From then on the student will learn that in American universities, philosophy is a card to file, a grade to get, a requirement to fill, and no more. Reality is elsewhere—it resides in the corporate profits and the permanent war economy. From the administrator he has nothing to learn. The bureaucrat’s advice comes from catalogs, his knowledge extends only to forms, his discourse is automatic repetition, and after the “job” he has nothing to say. Among high school students, many of the more intelligent quit school to become juvenile delinquents, and they try to find the adventure and meaning their society keeps from them by committing crimes against that society. Among university students, the few who retain a vestige of intellectual honesty and creative imagination become Beats, and they try to regain a worthwhile human community on the fringes of the corporate world, often succeeding in nothing more than becoming parasites of the corporate society and mirroring its values in reverse.

Because the White Collar people conspicuously occupy every niche and layer of the corporate society, because their work consists of “servicing, distributing, coordinating,” their spokesmen have tried to build around them a halo of Indispensability, and to derive from this halo the claim that Managers would become the new ruling class. The assumption of this spurious theory is that the indispensable rule. C. Wright Mills has exploded the logic of this argument. In every society, workers, farmers, and slaves are the most indispensable members, since it is they who carry on the society’s most basic activities. If indispensability were the mark of a ruling class, workers, peasants and slaves would have ruled every human society.

In actual fact, the indispensability of the White Collar people is a delusion limited to the White Collar people. The filing-cabinet has this delusion built-in. If a filing system is set up to classify trash according to certain characteristics, then of course each scrap has its “place,” and the man who finds the “place” is indispensable. If the function of a system is to file all trash and to keep records and cross-references on it, then each of the millions of trash-collectors will derive his “meaning” and “station” from the particular type of trash it is his role to file. The illusion of indispensability can be maintained only as long as no one emerges from the system to question the human relevance of filing trash. As soon as someone asks, the halo of indispensability bursts, and the Administrators suddenly become parasites devoting life and energy to irrelevant and superfluous activity. The nihilistic literature of our time, best exemplified by Beckett and Ionesco, is addressed to this middle layer of the corporate society, to the men who neither initiate activity nor carry it out, but merely file and classify, service, distribute, and coordinate.

The people in the Service Occupations are runners—but they do the running for someone else. In the corporations, they have neither voice nor control. Service is the proper name for their occupations. They constitute the new feudal hierarchy. The couriers of corporate capitalism are servants: their task is to carry other men’s projects, from those who initiate them to those who implement them; their function is to integrate the malfunctions of monopoly capitalism. Those who claim they’ll rule the corporate society do not in fact even rule themselves. Their style of life is set by their status, the sole purpose of their lives is to rise, the meaning of life is to have a “place” in the hierarchy. The search for creative activity and imaginative adventure has been whittled down to a ceaseless preoccupation with rank, station, position. The International Business Machines have imposed their style of life on the men who run them.

Since life is identified with the slot one occupies, individuality and human dignity are taken to mean action that corresponds to the slot. When A Secretary becomes The Head Secretary, she must take on the style of life of the new station. She must talk and dress and walk like a Head Secretary. She must thoroughly familiarize herself with the habits, and even the main idiocyncracies, of other Head Secretaries. The advertizers and movie makers specialize in providing the models. Every American vehicle of public transportation advertises the Miss Subways, Miss New York, Miss America, or Miss Alcoholic Beverage, and describes her main habits and activities for the edification of the millions who dutifully ape her style of life. As with “Interpersonal Relations,” the White Collar people intoxicate themselves with an illusion of their Individuality precisely because they have no individuality. The Individuality of White Collar consists of thinking and acting like all others in the same Position. Thus “individuality” is identified with the most servile conformism. Within this conformism, the most disgusting characteristic of the “mass society,” namely the search for invidious distinctions, becomes a mania. The runners accentuate their frantic conformism by lodging their “individuality” in the color of their cars, in the corporations that make their oars, in their ties, even in their names.

The mental and emotional vacuum of White Collar is where the “mass culture” finds a home. The world of comic strips, television heroes, and especially the world of the celebrities, are tailored for the personality-less couriers of corporate capitalism. Each Manager thinks himself the local incarnation of a celebrated movie hero; each secretary is the local Elizabeth Taylor or Deborah Kerr. When the actress Elizabeth Taylor was in a British hospital, New York office girls told each other they were “sick, just sick.” And the American Press, Protector of the educated and informed public indispensable to any democracy, obligingly gave front page accounts describing every phase of the Celebrity’s illness. When the movie actor Clark Gable died, Directors and Assistant-Directors all over the country “felt glum.” Trapped by their filing-cabinet world, the White Collar people do their “living” by means of television and the movies. They live by proxy; Marlon Brando does the “living” for hundreds of thousands of minor executives and their assistants. Public Relations, Advertising and Communications men mold the ideas and ideals of the Masses in the Administrative Hierarchy.

A Bureaucracy is always a disguised servility to the status quo. A bureaucrat’s greatest fear is a change of social institutions, although a change at the top is irrelevant to him. Predictability, Regularity, and Security are the absolute limits of the administrator’s life, and any social change inevitably threatens all three. A man who has spent his life “working his way up” cannot conceive that the slot he has been aiming to reach might be abolished or replaced. He would then be nothing. The bureaucracy requires no talents and provides no training. A manager’s only claim to relevance is his title. That the system of titles and ranks could be abolished is inconceivable to him: that would be the end of the world. The fact that the entire hierarchy exists to maintain the wealth and privilege of men who are not themselves within the hierarchy—this fact cannot penetrate the administrative mind without shattering it. Communication on these matters is impossible. Bureaucracy must be seen as part of the order of nature, as something that has always been and will always be. The White Collar man will be loyal to whoever protects the regularity, the routine, the ceaseless monotony, of his career. The subject matter of the forms is irrelevant, so long as the filing system remains the same. The purpose of the entire institution is irrelevant, so long as the ranks remain unchanged. The White Collar people would accept any regime so long as their “indispensability” was recognized. Among regimes, however, their preference is decidedly in favor of some form of military fascism. The WTiite Collar people were Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters. In Nazi Germany they not only had their rank-system ensured by a military regimentation of all society; they also had a real-life comic strip hero whose lunacy they could ape, through whom the smallest clerk could “live” and feel powerful enough to destroy the world. In the United States, vestiges of an earlier entrepreneurial capitalism still send occasional anxiety through the White Collar world. But the consolidation of economic activity into the hands of a few corporations, the increasing militarization of American society, and the growth of the permanent war economy, are effectively giving the Managers the type of Security they desire.

“I do not want an economic system so grossly inefficient that, at its most efficient—in the U.S., with every child bom to about five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to—it can achieve only twice the European standard of living, and then only at the cost of excluding three or four million citizens from work and spending over half the government’s income on lethal ironmongery,”[224] wrote Edward Hyams. In March 1961, according to official government statistics, five and a half million citizens were excluded from work,[225] and the expenditure on lethal ironmongery continued exceeding all previous bounds. The government’s count of those excluded from work was challenged in many quarters. A Monthly Review editorial pointed out that “the government counts as unemployed only those who are (a) without any work at all and (b) actively looking for a job. Hence its figure leaves entirely out of account those who are involuntarily idle a part of the time and those who would like a job but are not looking for one (usually because they know from their own and others’ experience that there is none to be had). It is not certain just how much should be added to the official figure to make good these omissions, but a careful study made by Philip Eden, economist for the West Coast longshore union, leaves no doubt that the needed adjustment is both absolutely and relatively large.”[226] According to the adjusted figure, there were more

than eight million unemployed citizens — which is of the labor force. In other words, “with every child bom to about five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to,” more than one out of ten people were excluded from work. In December 1960, according to official figures, the percentage of white citizens excluded from work was slightly less than 6%; of nonwhite citizens, 12%. “Among nonwhites the unemployment rate is thus twice as high as among whites,” commented the Monthly Review editorial. “What a splendid advertisement for the affluent society in a predominantly colored world!”[227]

Since 1946, United States workers are told, the American economy has been following a “full employment” policy. However, it is not the workers who interpret the laws in America. The Employment Act of 1946 is implemented by businessmen—big, corporate businessmen. As interpreted by the men who run the government, the Employment Act doesn’t really say anything: it speaks of maximum employment “in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Since “free competitive enterprise” is the polite name given to corporate practice, the law is unnecessary. The government of the United States has always acted “in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Obviously full employment would not “foster and promote” this ideal. In 1952, there were two million people without work in the United States. Paul Baran quoted a frank statement from Business Week which vividly demonstrates how the corporate businessmen dislike such “low” unemployment: “Unemployment remains too low for the work force to have flexibility. Anytime the jobless total is less than 2 million, even common labor is scarce. Many employers must tend to hoard skills. And certainly, the labor unions are in the driver’s seat in wage negotiations. More workers can be had, to be sure. But only at considerable cost. And they probably wouldn’t be of the skills most desired. There’s no assurance against inflation like a pool of genuine unemployment. That’s a blunt, hard-headed statement, but a fact.”[228] In 1961, the businessmen got their with a “pool of genuine unemployment” containing eight million people “calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Clearly, the Employment Act does not mean what the poor read into it; the Law is not designed to upset the status quo, but to maintain it; when “unemployment remains too low for the work force to have flexibility,” it is not consistent with “free competitive enterprise.” As the satirist of the Constitution wrote in 1788, “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.”[229]

For the American worker, the “free competitive enterprise” of the corporations means constant anxiety, intellectual and psychic fragmentation, and incomplete development. The constant threat of unemployment is accompanied by constant pecuniary anxiety. A man beset with rents, bills, food expenditures, automobile maintenance, and contingencies with no end, does not have the conditions required for creative contemplation or intellectual development. Unless he is very unusual, his circumstances will not permit him to seek to extend the frontiers of human knowledge, or to devise projects for community participation. If he has time-off, he will seek to forget the rents, bills and contingencies, and the best way to forget is to immerse himself in mindless activity. The Cony Islands of the corporate world are the epitome of mindlessness available to anxiety-ridden men trying frantically to forget they have no control over their lives. If the worker’s hours are shortened, he will seek to lessen the anxiety of rents, bills, contingencies, by getting an additional job and spending his life in endless accumulation for “in case.” Money is made the condition for survival, and then workers concerned with survival are roundly condemned for their lack of other interests by the rich who have no need to be concerned. To survive, a worker must have a “job” and each “job” requires a “skill.” In order to have a “skill,” a worker must have spent a portion of his life pushing, pulling, pressing, stamping, filing, shaking.... Those who have no “skill” are not exterminated in the corporate society: they are allowed to live and sleep on the sidewalks and doorways of the Bowerys and the Skid Rows of the cities. It is the “skill” that defines the humanity of a worker; without it, he’s an animal, as useless to himself as to the corporate masters. It is the “skill” that makes a worker someone at the employment offices: there a man is not asked about his ideals, his goals, his projects; he is asked “what’s your skill?” In the corporate society, Socrates would be doomed to speak to the drunken wretches of the Bowery. Socrates did not have what the employment offices consider a “useful skill.” The developed human being cannot survive in the world of skilled employes. Only those who successfully transform themselves into “hands” can survive. The most employable worker is the one who has devoted his life to one “skill,” and who has effectively suppressed his intellect and imagination to the point of being able to put up with the drudgery and boredom of the one-skill life.

The Advertising Council, however, by means of the “free press,” informs the world that America is a “People’s Capitalism,” and that the United States “has come closest to a democratic, classless society...”[230] and so on. In short, Everyone has a Share in People’s Capitalism, America is a Shareholder’s Democracy, and, if it weren’t for the unions and their constant grasping for bigger Handouts, America would be Paradise. However, according to the 1953 Economic Report of the President to Congress, “average hourly earnings in manufacturing, adjusted for consumers’ price changes, have not risen faster than the economy’s real productivity gains, but instead apparently have lagged significantly.”[231]

In other words, in spite of their endless grasping, the unions have not even succeeded in maintaining their members’ share of the wealth; they’ve let it get smaller. But the profits ofthe Holders don’t get smaller: they’ve been going uphill since 1787. And not all the 180 million Americans are Shareholders, nor do the relatively large number of Shareholders own a significant number of shares. Paul Baran quoted a Brookings Institute study on Share Ownership which contained the following statistics: “...2.3 percent of all stockholders in manufacturing corporations account for 57 percent of the total number of those corporations’ shares. In the field of public utilities 1 percent of shareholders own 46 percent of all shares. In finance and investment 3 percent of shareholders control 53 percent of the number of shares, and in transportation 1.5 percent of shareholders hold 56 percent of stock.”[232] Thus the Advertising Council was fibbing; its account of the “democratic, classless society” was neither history, nor science, nor truth. But advertizers will be the first to admit that corporations would not hire them if they dealt with history, or science, or truth. Any advertizer “who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.”[233] If such demands were made of advertizers, unemployment would rise yet higher.

The Advertising Council’s “democratic, classless society” is an undemocratic class society. If America is a Shareholder’s Democracy, then it has a far smaller proportion of Citizens than ancient Athens, which was a slave society. Less than 4% of the United States population own shares,[234] and of this four percent, less than three percent own a tremendously large proportion of the shares. At this rate the modern Athens that calls itself a Shareholder’s Democracy can only boast that one out of every 750 members of its population is a Citizen. The “democratic, classless society” and the Shareholder’s Democracy” cannot stand to be scrutinized. Scrutiny takes patience, effort and time. It is far easier for an advertizer to make claims than for a scholar to disprove them. The advertizer has merely to say so, and it is so. The scholar must spend years of study, thought and analysis to say it is not so—and then he’s not as well rewarded, if rewarded at all.

The North American Paradise is heavenly only for the chosen few who, through the grace of Mammon, were hoisted up into Eden at some historical point. This garden, too, is confined to those whom Gerrard Winstanley called the “Adams of the earth.” For the rest— those whom Hamilton called “the mass of mankind”—Heaven still lies in the grave. In a recent study, Leo Huberman compared some significant statistics about the unheavenly circumstances most people are born to in “People’s Capitalism.” There are a few Adams in America who are billionaires: that is, there are a few men whose personal incomes are greater than the total value of all property in the United States at the time of the American Revolution. These are the heirs of “five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to,” And yet, one third of all American families receive incomes of less than $4000, and one fourth, less than $3,000.”[235] According to Fortune magazine, “families with after-tax incomes under $4000 are obliged to spend just about everything on the necessities of food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and medical care.”[236] Consequendy, while wealthy Adams dress and keep their garden of Eden, the other “creatures” crawl from slum to slum. Huberman quoted the following from the editor of The Housing Yearbook: “New slum areas are found in every large city. Families displaced by slum clearance have to move elsewhere, and Congress sees to it that there isn’t enough low-rent public housing for them. So they go into the big old houses of the 19th century, with a dozen families occupying space designed for a single household. Or they find shoddily built little houses on a 25-loot lot.”[237] And a West Virginia Congressman, representative ot a “distressed area” outside of Eden, said in 1959: “In areas of chronic unemployment I have talked with families who have not had fresh milk, eggs, meat, or citrus juices for periods ranging up to 2 years. These Americans actually exist on a diet less than half as nutritive as that provided for the occupants of displaced persons camps in Europe after World War II.”[238] The original Lord had given the Adams dominion over all other creatures; He had, however, made the following proviso: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” And between twenty- four and twenty-nine centuries later, the Digger, Winstanley, amplified the Lord’s saying in the following terms: “O you Adams of the earth, you have rich clothing, full bellies.... But know... that the day of judgment is begun.... The poor people whom thou oppresses shall be the saviors of the land.”

The new Adams have not been unmindful of old Jehovah’s warning; with the help of Mammon they have converted Eden into a Crystal Palace with floors of asphalt and concrete, walls of steel and glass. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil cannot grow on glass, steel and concrete. Consequently, the Adams will not eat from the tree, and they will not die from their knowledge of good and evil. They will perhaps stifle from the lack of earth and air and men, but they will not die from knowledge. On their Park Avenue, the Corporate Adams have confined the earth to a “park” which separates two asphalt roadways— the “park,” in Percival Goodman’s measurements, “consists of little islands 16’ wide.” On the far sides of the asphalt stand the monuments which advertise the corporate products: whiskey, soap, money.... And inside, “people in the thousands sit in mechanically controlled atmospheres handling endless pieces of paper. In the hushed quiet of acoustically treated spaces, they talk to a variety of instruments from silken blonds to black telephones. In these great aquaria, sportsmen fish in stenographic pools. Most everything is brittle, transparent, brightly lighted, invisibly operated, synthetic. But the carpets are deep, soft to the spiked heels and extended endlessly from wall to wall. Outside the trains rumble underground and on the street no one wants to linger. The shards of glass are paper thin.”[239] The architectural advertising in the Empire City grows with unprecedented speed: the cost of the corporate showhouses on Park Avenue represents potential housing for millions of homeless Indians. Looking at the world from air-conditioned rooms through steel-lined panes of glass, however, the chosen ones are not likely to discover their relation to the burning heat outside. To them, the New Freedom is real. Not only have they been assured financial “security,” far more lucrative than was enjoyed by the Krupps and Farbens of the earlier Nazi version of a corporate capitalism. The New World’s Adams have also streamlined their manipulative techniques to heights never reached before. Robert Jungk, a German journalist familiar at first-hand with the Nazi version of the nation of obedient servants, was astounded by the extent and direction of North American progress in manipulation. In a book entitled Tomorrow Is Already Here, Jungk described, not the police brutality, the political persecutions, or the other extreme situations which are localized in area and restricted to few people, but the subde, widespread phenomena, the little things with which every worker is familiar: “...the far more innocent and ethically unobjectionable techniques of counseling, the public opinion polls and the promotion of happy industrial relations, have indirect effects all too reminiscent of similar phenomena in the totalitarian states. Knowing that before and during their employment they are being watched by people in whose hands lies their economic fate, many who wish to keep their jobs speak in a way that does not reflect their true feelings.

“Millions of Americans, as soon as they cross the threshold of their place of work step, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, into roles which correspond to what the soul engineers expect of them. They are happy, and ‘keep smiling’ even when they do not feel so inclined. They act as though they were ‘well balanced’ and ‘perfecdy normal’ even when they have a tremendous urge to kick over the traces. They strain every fiber to suppress their natural aggressiveness and to be ‘good companions’ with whom everyone easily gets along, even when they would like to break into loud curses at the next desk. And above all they behave as though they were loyal to the firm through thick and thin, even if they find more to criticize in it than to praise.

“This standard mask ofthe ‘jolly good fellow’, ofthe ‘easy going guy’, of the ‘sweet girl’, grows on to some of them as a second face....’”[240]

The upkeep of the Crystal Palace, its masters, and its “soul engineers,” is an expensive proposition, and the toll is not confined to the “natives” of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The cities of the corporate paradise also contain unprivileged “natives.” According to the Chairman of the City and Regional Planning Dept, at Harvard University, “Despite all efforts being made by public and private enterprise, cities are deteriorating at a faster rate than they are being renewed through new construction, repair or maintenance. Not one city is known to have a program so complete as to be able to renew at even the same rate that its deterioration takes place.”[241] Millions of incomplete, manipulated, faceless men, each with his “skill,” travel obediently through underground tunnels from the slums in which they live to the factories or air-conditioned rooms in which they work Perhaps they are dead. Maybe they are only asleep, and maybe when they wake and realize they’ve been robbed of their humanity, they will not wait for their birthright until the day when their masters eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

***

The Crystal Palace, with the slums that house its window-cleaners, its unskilled workers, its outcasts, is not self-sustaining. A world-wide proletariat supports the luxurious skyscrapers along Park Avenue. This symbiotic relationship between domestic wealth and external misery was keenly understood by an early advocate of the Constitution, who in 1787 urged his countrymen to adopt the document so that “The spoils of the West-Indies and South America may enrich the next generation of Cincinnati.”[242] According to “a Discussion Prepared for Leaders of American Industry” by three United States scientists, “At one end of the economic scale we find the people of the United States, representing but 6 percent of the world’s population, able, largely as the result of the high level of industrialization and the abundant resources with which the land was originally endowed, to consume about 50 percent of the goods produced in the world.”[243] And a British scientistJ.D. Bernal, has estimated that the capitalists who consume half the world’s spoils, could easily undertake to feed, house and educate the millions whose sacrificed lives are displayed on Park Avenue. “The great monopolies that directly or indirectly control the whole of capitalist industry have ample means from their internal reserves not only to remodel but vastly to extend their production so as to be able to provide enough for the whole rest of the world. They could easily finance the industrial ization of all the underdeveloped countries...”[244] If they chose to do so. Bernal is well aware, however, that the beneficiaries of half the world’s wealth are interested in profits, not in world wellbeing. “Inexorably, all their activity—the volume of production, the rate of capital investment, the flow of development and research—is at the mercy of the state of the market and the estimates of profit margins. It would seem on the face of it that there was something radically wrong here. The new scientific, productive machine has already outgrown the financial system that first brought it into existence. If we have bigger capacity than we had dreamed of before, we must have bigger aims. The objects of profits, even big corporation profits, are trivial compared to the real benefits measured in human wellbeing, that could be poured out if the new methods were allowed to be freely used and developed at evergrowing rate. If this cannot be done because of the laws of economics, then it is about time those laws were looked into. People are asking if they are really laws of Nature or conventions to protect particular interests, and whether in either case they have any relevance to a world of free power and unlimited automation.”[245]

The “laws of economics” which sustain the empire of corporate wealth and world wretchedness are a vast mystery. They are not natural laws, since they are enforced by armies of men. They are not human laws, since they do not promote justice. The capitalist “laws of economics” are not laws at all; they are fictions by means of which capitalists justify taking for themselves what belongs to all men. For the corporations, the world is a vast arena for profits. In corporate anthropology there are no cultures, civilizations, histories or traditions; there are only sources of raw materials, sources of cheap labor, and markets. Most of living humanity, except those who have extricated themselves from this net of “laws,” fit one of these categories; some fit all three. Corporate practice consists of taking the raw materials of other continents cheaply, processing them, and selling the finished products very expensively This “law of economics” is very lucrative for the corporate Holders. According to statistics given in a Monthly Review editorial, “As of 1959 total United States private investment abroad was $448 billion.... Total sales by American-owned enterprises abroad in 1957 came to $32 billion.... Sales of American-owned manufacturing firms abroad in 1957 were 50 percent higher than experts of comparable goods from the United States. In other words, for American business as a whole foreign operations are much more important than export trade.”[246] According to Business Week, “of the 100 largest industrial corporations (ranked by 1957 domestic sales) 99 are involved today in one or another kind of overseas operation.... All told, at least 3,000 U.S. companies have money invested directly in foreign production and distribution. Working alongside these operating companies are dozens of U.S. engineering and contracting outfits, management and marketing consultants, and the foreign branches of U.S. banks.”[247] All these “investments” get very profitable “returns” because the overseas workers, being “natives,” are considered sub-human, and consequendy are paid less than American workers; sometimes they are barely paid at all. The raw materials so cheaply acquired and so cheaply processed are then sold at the highest price they fetch in the United States. The difference between what the “item” costs to produce, and what it sells for, does not reach the men in the Philippines, Peru or Venezuela; the difference goes as profit to the corporate Holders; some of it is used to broadcast “free enterprise” and “free world” propaganda over the corporate media of communication. In order to sell their products expensively, the corporations must have markets. At this juncture their “laws of economics” muddle their interests somewhat. One of the main advantages of the “foreign investments” is that they work for almost nothing. The outcome, however, is that the “natives” remain poor, and poor men do not constitute a market: they cannot afford to buy the corporate goods. Consequently, the U.S. corporations that produce goods abroad sell a substantial amount of these goods to consumers in die U.S. This may sound a little silly, but it is profitable to the corporations, and consequently is a “law of economics.” For example, the United States has one of the world’s largest oil deposits, but much of the oil in American cars comes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela.... U.S. inhabitants, however, constitute only 6% of the world’s population, and can only consume 50% of the world’s goods. The rest must be sold elsewhere. Since the starving wretches in the “underprivileged nations” cannot buy very much, the capitalists are in a rut. If they produce more than they can sell, then the market will be glutted, and prices will fall, and profits will fall—God forbid! that’s precisely what the “laws of economics” are designed to prevent! Profits never fall. The brunt filters down to the internal proletariat, who are better paid than the overseas “natives” and so must be “laid-off,” and domestic unemployment climbs to 8 million. The capitalists will not give their goods, or sell them cheaply, to men who need them. That’s not profitable; it’s not a “law of economics.” Consequently, to maintain the price that fetches big profits, the domestic proletariat is laid off work, the external proletariat is left in a state of misery, and the vast technological heritage which could forever abolish both the unemployment and the misery, is left idle. The minimum number of calories required for healthy life is set at about 2700 per day; below that number, deficiency diseases take hold of the human body, dull the intellect, and shrivel the imagination. Within the capitalist imperium, the so-called “Free World,” there are few outside of Western Europe and the United States who consume 2700 calories, but many who consume less than 1500. The freedom to eat, live, think and learn, are not provided for in the corporate “laws of economics;” they are not the freedoms found in the “Free World.”

“I do not want an economic system which, while paying farmers not to grow food in fertile land, desperately urges others to plant food crops in unfertile land, and, with huge food surpluses which it fails to distribute, leaves half the world’s people on the edge of starvation,” wrote Edward Hyams.[248] The marvelous “laws of economics” are such that, while most of the world’s population are unfed, unhoused, untaught, wheat and com and fruit are fed to animals in the United States, and sometimes even destroyed—to keep the prices high. The Wall Street Journal described the workings of this “law” with regard to peaches: “California canners and growers agreed to destroy about 18 percent of the state’s estimated 705,000-ton cling peach crop to prevent a market glut. The previous high cling peach pack in California, one of the largest peach producing states, was 552,000 tons last year. Each year the state sets a limit on the amount of cling peaches which may be canned after receiving recommendations of canners and growers. The quota is designed to keep supply from exceeding demand and, in effect prevents market prices from falling.”[249] With respect to automobiles, the Wall Street Journal had the following advice: “What is really needed, obviously, is some ‘crash’ legislation by Congress which would have the Government buy two million cars and dump them in the middle of the Atlantic.”[250] Obviously, the capitalists would readily line the bottom of the sea with automobiles, if that fetched the high price. They do not care who needs their products, nor what use their products have, so long as the profits keep climbing.

The obedient “masses” of “People’s Capitalism” are told, by the corporate media of communication, that the misery, the plunder, the waste, are all “in the national interest,” that the destruction of food and vehicles is a protection of Our Way of Life. And the Americans acquiesce and believe what their corporate masters tell them, because Americans have for many generations been trained to believe all that their corporate masters tell them. When Woodrow Wilson, early in this century, urged his countrymen to participate in “The New Freedom,” he roused many Americans, especially corporate ones, to enthusiasm. The historian William A. Williams has shown, however, that Wilson did not refer to anything new, nor to freedom—unless freedom is taken in its peculiar American definition, where it means the “freedom” to plunder, the “freedom” to expand the corporate empire. Wilson’s New Freedom referred to “the market to which diplomacy, and if need be power, must make an open way.”[251] This open way was to be realized by very ancient means, namely force: “it is evident that empire is an affair of strong government.”[252] Secretary of State Bryan explained the meaning of Wilsonian “freedom” even more clearly: it meant to “open the doors of all the weaker countries to an invasion of American capital and enterprise.”[253] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not unclear about America’s foreign policy either; he set out “to secure a lowering of foreign walls (so) that a larger measure of our surplus may be admitted abroad.”[254] As Williams points out, “freedom,” in the modern American vocabulary, has been made synonymous with trade, and “inherent in the approach was a definition of trade that went far beyond the idea of an exchange of commodities and services. The denotation of the definition emphasized trade as the expansion of markets for America’s corporate system’, while the connotations stressed the control and development of raw- material supplies.”[255] This program can only be carried out in a world where “doors” are “open” to American investments; where laborers are “free” to work for small wages; where markets are “open” for high priced corporate products. This section of the world has been named the “Free World” for the past fifteen years, and its “freedom” has been safeguarded by an ever-increasing tempo of violence, terror and annihilation. The “Free World” is the outer limit beyond which the corporate system cannot expand, and the maintenance of this “freedom” has become the sole international concern of latter-day capitalism.

Yet in spite of all the ironmongery designed to protect with violence, the “Free World” constantly diminishes in size. This happens in spite of the fact that capitalists are under the impression that they give “aid” and the “blessings of civilization” to the world’s unprivileged. That the aid, as well as the blessings, serve only to enrich the corporations, while yet further impoverishing the “natives,” does not seem to penetrate the corporate consciousness. The hungry men in the colonies cannot help but notice that many of the defectors from the “Free World” are on their way towards the creation of human economies, and they cannot help but notice that their own misery is related to the corporate “operations” in their lands. The “natives” grow resdess, they start to clamor for food, life and decency, they start to resent being martyred to the American Way of Life. The clamor of the “natives” alarms the corporations. To abolish the unrest, the corporations seek frantically to increase their “development” and “aid” programs. They push through Congress vast Housing Programs for Peru or Puerto Rico. Big United States investors are sent to the “underdeveloped nation” to buy the land, to raze the slums on it. Big United States contractors, architects and engineers are sent to build the houses, the roads, the shopping centers. Big public relations firms are hired to advertise United States generosity towards the world’s “natives.” And yet, every investigation of such “development programs” reveals that the houses are so expensive only United States executives and wealthy local capitalists can rent them; that the wretches whose slums were razed to build the houses are left homeless; that the only beneficiaries of the “aid” were the American investors, the American contractors, architects, engineers—plus perhaps a few wealthy local landlords. Public money is transferred to the pockets of the rich, but the American people are told they must sacrifice a portion of their taxes to “benefit mankind.” The American people, mis-educated, misinformed and obedient, acquiesce in the higher wisdom of their masters. The “natives,” however, though they are no better educated or informed, cannot so easily acquiesce: the hunger is too real, the plunder too visible. Men whose misery increases daily, year after year, generation after generation, cannot effectively be told they are being “aided,” “benefitted,” or “developed.” The misery grows and the unrest grows, and a point is reached when misery becomes unbearable and the restlessness becomes revolution.

And then comes the grand explanation. Since the capitalists are convinced they have been doing all they could for the world’s “natives,” then obviously they cannot be responsible for all the tension, the unrest, the revolutions. Clearly if the capitalists are not responsible for the unrest in the colonies, then someone else must be responsible. Since all anticapitalists are called communists, and since communists openly advocate the overthrow of capitalism, then clearly they are the single cause of all the world’s unrest. The communists “exploit” the misery brought by the corporations, and thus “instigate” demonstrations, riots, and revolutions. This type of reasoning used to be called totalitarian logic by Americans of a former day. Today it is called Freedom and everyone believes in it. The “explanation” does not explain anything—rather it explains everything away—but it is enforced by the world’s greatest military Power, and thus cannot be doubted without risk to life, liberty, and happiness. As soon as the grand explanation is applied, there’s no more need for “aid” and “development” programs. If the “Communists are taking over” it is pointless to build more houses for corporate executives. From that point on, the only “aid” sent is military “aid.” The “communists” must be suppressed—even if the “communists” comprise an entire nation of miserable wretches who ask no more than bread and homes. Senator Hubert Humphrey seemed highly stunned when he recently found out the purpose of American military aid. The innocent Senator exclaimed, “Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid—it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. That Army isn’t planning to fight the Russians. It’s planning to fight the Iranian people.”[256]

The “solution,” however, doesn’t work. The unrest caused by the misery cannot be abolished by violence. The revolutions are postponed, die bloodshed is increased, the terror is intensified, but the unrest is not abolished. The local armies are not stable; they cannot effectively be taught that the profits of American corporations are synonymous with the “freedom” of their starving countrymen. The local soldiers, after all, are themselves members of the population they are hired to repress, and they cannot effectively be brainwashed to believe they can “save” their countrymen by exterminating them. Consequently, the unrest grows, and the revolutions take place in spite of all the massive military “aid.” The military “aid” is stepped up astronomically, men are slaughtered in ever-increasing numbers, and yet the unrest becomes ever more profound, ever more widespread. The military metaphysicians of the Pentagon and the C.I.A. become frantic; they cease to cope rationally with events. Within their narrow ideological walls, they cannot understand how unrest can continue even after all the “agitators” have been put to death. Since they take the profit-world for granted, they do not look there for the cause of unrest; consequently, they cannot find the cause of all their failures. Yet the military metaphysicians of the corporate society, the self-proclaimed “realists,” continue to believe there is one cause behind all their failures. If ye seek ye shall find—and they do: every demonstration anywhere in the world originates in Moscow; every setback to the corporate imperium originates in Moscow; every’ revolution originates in Moscow. Sancta Simplicita. The “Free World” grows ever smaller, and the communists are blamed—or rather, praised—for every event. If the miserable millions of the world believed American propaganda, they would picture the communists as heroes, liberators and saviors. Washington’s propaganda, coming from the mouths of those who profess to hate the communists, is far more effective than any propaganda the communists could devise. The American propaganda media attribute to “the men in the Kremlin” an all-but omnipotent intelligence, and an iron determination to “nibble away” at the corporate empire. With such an advertising campaign, there would be communist revolutions even if Moscow didn’t exist.

Capitalists grow frantic. They see men everywhere abolishing private property, expropriating corporations, building economies which distribute wealth, goods and opportunities more equally. They see, in short, that the “Free World” grows smaller and smaller, while the circle of men who refuse to call the freedom of the few freedom, grows larger and larger. The rejections of capitalism take many different forms and have little in common, except their determined rejection of capitalism. Yet in the corporate philosophy every rejection of capitalism, whatever its differences and whatever its similarities to all the others, represents always the same thing: the International Communist Conspiracy. So defined, all the revolutions arc unintelligible to the corporate experts. The latter-day “realists” first define revolutions as the outcome of the great conspiracy—of the fiendish machinations of Moscow. They then seek to interpret the revolutions in terms with which they are familiar, that is, they expect the communist “conspirators” to work the same way their own cloak-and-dagger outfits work. Thus they expect regimes ruled by a Conspiracy to be highly unstable and to collapse. They expect, in other words, that the social revolutions will be as unstable as the regimes ruled by the United States Armed Forces and the C.IA., such as South Korea, Formosa, South Vietnam, regimes where the State Department does not insist on “free elections.” Yet the instability is all on one side. The societies that have emerged from social revolutions are among the stablest in the world,{6} whereas the Koreas, Iraqs, Irans, Vietnams, Formosas, Guatemalas, Congos, Laos, comprise a full history’ of unrest. The corporate explanations leave the revolutions unexplained. Every charge the capitalists make bounces back at them. The professional counter-revolutionaries predict that non-capitalist societies could never achieve the material prosperity of the capitalist paradise; when some of them do so, in fractions of the time it took the United States to do so, they drop the charge. They next claim that communist, socialist, “neutralist,” and other non-cap- italist societies can never achieve the level of employment achieved in paradise. Yet the chronic unemployment turns out to be confined to the corporate empire; most of the socialist societies have a shortage of labor, and the other non-capitalist societies seem to be coping with unemployment with far greater seriousness than the United States. None of the revolutions achieve Utopia, and ugly remains of archaic institutions undoubtedly hamper all of them; the revolutions do not transform mere men into saints and angels. But among the defectors from the “Free World,” prices get cheaper and cheaper, education becomes widespread, food becomes universally available, and houses become gradually accessible to all: the overall improvement in the condition of life is unquestionable. Thus the capitalists are deprived of all their charges, and thus as a last resort they level their foulest claim: the populations of the non-capitalist societies do not enjoy the “freedoms” which are available to capitalists in the corporate society. King Louis could well have groaned that the French revolutionaries were depriving themselves of his extravagant tastes. The loss of “freedom” for the few to enrich themselves at the expense of the many is not a tragic loss. The language in which this charge is couched, however, threatens to submerge in a dark age one of the fine human ideals. For the capitalists identify their “freedom” and their dispensation with the freedom of the democratic, equalitarian, classless society described by Babeuf, Jefferson, Taylor, Marx. Too many of the anti-capitalist revolutionaries take the capitalists at their word, and they reject the capitalist version of “freedom” by rejecting the democratic ideal as well. Yet if the revolutionary societies achieve equality, if they make abundance available to all, and if on such a ground they open the avenues of creative participation to all their members, then they will have personal freedoms and civil liberties such as never existed under capitalism. Such a society is still today Utopia, but the seeds of Utopia are being sown, and should any of them sprout, the calls of derision from those who claim a private monopoly over Utopia will fall on deaf ears.

The corporate society is in fact seriously threatened by Russia, China, Yugoslavia, India, Ghana, Indonesia, Poland, Cuba—but not because of the reasons given by’ the capitalists. It is not Russian or Chinese or Cuban military strength, or rockets, or “conspiracy,” that threaten the capitalists. The threat comes from the fact that all of the world’s non-capitalist societies offer mankind models, however half- baked, of alternatives to capitalist plunder, nihilism, and dehumanization. The capitalists do not fear what is bad in the revolutionary experiments: the coercion, the censored press, the secret police with which to battle real and imagined terrorism. All these things have by now become permanent institutions of the corporate world. What the capitalists fear is precisely the good, the promise and the hope, of the social experiments: the equality, the participation, the joy of creation. Why? Why do the capitalists ape the worst and fear the best institutions growing out of the revolutions? Because if the experiments should succeed, then the hungry, the unhoused, the uneducated, will defect in mass from the “Free World.” Because, if the experiments should succeed and be followed by more, then the slums of the Corporate Heaven will be the ugliest in the world, the inhabitants of “People’s Capitalism” will be the least educated, least informed, least creative inhabitants on the planet. If too many “natives” defect from the “Free World,” then the corporate profits will fall, and the architectural advertisements on Park Avenue will deteriorate into ugly, monstrous boxes of rusted steel and filthy glass, and the gaudy billboards with the legend “Money Works For You” will be tasteless reminders of the inhuman criminality of the Holders’ and Bankers’ Paradise.

***

To ward off the vision of a deteriorated Eden, the capitalists can only strike out with hatred, violence and destruction. To preserve a system of plunder which all humanity is rejecting, the capitalists have frozen themselves into a military society which increasingly rules out all aims and projects inconsistent with annihilation. Unable, at the end, to solve their problems rationally, the capitalists have at last abandoned rationality and sought “solutions” of all their problems in a permanent war economy. Domestic and external profits, the safeguarding of investments, the repression of unrest, the prevention of revolutions, are all synthesized by the permanent war economy, although psychotically. To prolong the life of corporate wealth and privilege, the corporate rulers have transformed their society into an armed camp where men are employed, directly or indirectly, in the manufacture of instruments of death. The rulers of the corporate empire are determined to continue taking “freedoms” that mankind is no longer willing to relinquish; they are armed with the power to annihilate all life; they are supported by a vast population thoroughly indoctrinated to impose the will of its corporate masters over the rest of humanity.

“World Trade means World Peace” to the corporate rulers, but only on the terms of the “tradesmen,” and at the point of a gun. The absolute monarchs of former days waged innumerable bloody wars and dispensed a great deal of misery. But the absolute monarchs would not have dared to decree involuntary conscription for fear their populations would rise in rebellion, and they would not have thought to willfully destroy civilian populations for fear their kingdoms would topple. In the era of Capitalist Freedom, however, the soldiery ceased to be confined to volunteers, and armies ceased to be the only victims. The businessman’s peace is rising profits, and he can neither attain nor protect his peace except with the sword. Since every material object that can be captured is an object of profit, the outer limit of capitalist “peace” cannot be reached until the businessman has absolute “freedom” over all the world’s material objects. At the beginnings of America’s commercial career, the great capitalist political theorist Alexander Hamilton outlined with unsurpassed clarity the relationship of commerce to war. “Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives, since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite...?”[257]

Until the advent of Fascism in the twentieth century, capitalists had regarded war as an auxiliary means to achieve their ends, and they turned to war as a last resort. The rise of Nazi Germany, however, brutally put to death all Humanist traditions that had restrained the greed of businessmen, and made war the central institution of capitalist society. The rise of the permanent war economy in Italy, Germany and the United States, established war as the most “efficient” means by which capitalists could attain their goals, as well as the only means by which the corporate system could be kept from collapsing.

Internally, the permanent war economy has become the main source of corporate profit as well as the only alternative to catastrophic depression. The manufacture of weapons is today the most lucrative business, by far, of the corporate society. The entire nation of 180 million people—farmers, workers, white collar clerks, shopkeepers—are taxed by the government. The taxes are tremendous: millions of men pay them, and each pays an average minimum of one fourth his wage; many pay a great deal more. The government spends this money— amounts which cannot be counted or even clearly conceived—to buy weapons of extermination. According to Business Week, “No matter how it’s described, the business of piling up weapons is bigger than any other industry. It runs to $14.5 billion a year, if you count only major military hardware contracts. It climbs to $25 billion a year when you add research and development, operation and maintenance of such vast systems as the DEW line, and construction of airfields and missile launching bases. It hits around $41 billion a year when you include everything else on which the Defense Dept, spends money. By way of a yardstick: the international oil business, the largest single industry, pumps up around $10 billion worth of petroleum a year.”[258] No matter how it’s described, the business of extermination is for the corporations the biggest pot of gold ever created by men. For the biggest corporations get the biggest war contracts, and they are paid with money contributed by the entire population. When a government of the rich funneled the taxes of the population into their own private vaults for the first time in American history, a Congressman had exclaimed with indignation: “We shall return to the mass of the people, and participate in the burdens we impose. When the cool hour of investigation arrives, happy indeed will it be for us if, amid the murmurs of an oppressed people, we have not to say, in self-condemnation, I too have been guilty of bringing this load of fetters on the people. America, sir, will not always think as is the fashion of the present day; and when the iron hand of tyranny is felt, denunciations will fall on those who, by imposing this enormous and iniquitous debt, will beggar the people and bind them in chains.”[259] The denunciations have not yet fallen, and even the indignation is no longer expressed. The “iron hand of tyranny” is far too profitable, even for its smallest beneficiary, to be denounced. The permanent war economy is a fountain of never-ending wealth, and those who drink from it drown forever all protest, all indignation. The market for weapons is literally bottomless, and the weapon of extermination is the most profitable commodity yet devised by profit-seekers. Automobile manufacturers build “obsolescence” into their vehicles: they hire large research staffs to see to it that the damage is beyond repair; and yet clever Americans outwit the corporations and maintain automobiles for as long as five years. The weapon-makers, however, cannot be so outwitted: their products can neither be maintained nor repaired, but must constantly be discarded. In an age of frenzied technological change, a weapon is obsolete long before its manufacture is completed. The Wall Street Journal had urged that “the government buy two million cars and dump them in the middle of the Atlantic.”[260] This is precisely what is accomplished by the permanent war economy. Faster planes, bigger ships, deadlier bombs, rockets, submarines, gases, are constantly developed by the Scientists of the corporate society, the older versions of the weapons are discarded, the corporations are paid to manufacture the “latest” weapons, and these in turn are discarded before they are finished. The bottom of the sea becomes increasingly lined with the “commodities” around which the corporate economy revolves.

The permanent war economy has become the central institution of the corporate society and the only means for capitalist survival. Without recourse to the war economy, capitalism would collapse from a catastrophic depression of far greater dimensions than the Great Depression of 1929. The productive facilities are today so great they can produce infinitely more goods than anyone can buy. There’s a crying need for goods in all parts of the world, but the world’s poor cannot afford to buy them. T he corporate society is faced with three alternatives. Its productive facilities could be used to make goods for free distribution to all in the world who need them, or to make goods which the government would buy and dump into the sea, or to make weapons. Without resort to one of these three alternatives, there would be depression and collapse: the goods would accumulate and none in the world would buy them—there would be a glut; to prevent a fall in the profits of the Holders, the corporations would lay off workers; the unemployed would not be able to buy the goods of other corporations, and these corporations in turn would lay off workers. The process is familiar to all American workers and farmers over thirty years old, but Americans seem to have phenomenally short memories—or else they’ve been taught to believe the depression was not brought on by capitalism, but by visitors from Mars. Of the alternatives to depression, the corporate “elite” prefer the third: to turn America’s productive facilities to the manufacture of weapons. The production and free distribution of goods for those who need them is completely alien to the corporate way of life. In the world’s wealthiest land, not even medical treatment is available to men who cannot afford to pay the high prices demanded by the Association for Medical Appropriation. It can hardly be expected that capitalists would willingly distribute their goods among those who need them. The entire institutional complex of the corporate society is nothing but a vast machine which lodges the world’s wealth, privilege and property into the hands of the rich. If privilege is distributed among the unprivileged, it ceases to be privilege. If the capitalist society distributed its goods among the world’s poor, it would cease to be a capitalist society. Rational distribution to fulfill human needs and abolish misery might bring the world not only socialism, but democracy as well. Such an alternative is clearly inconsistent with the central tenets of the acquisitive society. The second way to dispose of capitalist surplus goods would be for the corporation-men in the government to use public tax money to buy corporate products, and to dump the products into the ocean, or let them rot. This is in fact done: farmers are paid not to grow anything on fertile soil; fruits are destroyed; food is bought, stored, and allowed to rot. This alternative, however, does not appeal to the capitalists either. It is too clearly waste, and it cannot be justified. The third alternative—to use the world’s greatest productive facilities for the production of weapons—is the only alternative acceptable to the corporate “elite.” The market for weapons is a bottomless pit, and thus there will never be a “glut” on weapons. Depression is kept away, unemployment does not reach revolutionary proportions, and profits are extremely high. What is more, the manufacture of weapons can always be justified in terms of National Greatness and National Defense. Thus the corporations can appropriate public taxes from the sale of goods to the government without any danger of socialism or democracy, since the weapons sold to the government serve the double purpose of increasing the profits of the rich while at the same time protecting those profits. John Taylor had observed, a century and a half ago, that the capitalists “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.”[261]

The war economy is thus primarily a “solution” to the economic problems of the corporate society. What the capitalists cannot admit is that the war economy has become a permanent feature of latter- day capitalist society; the manufacture of instruments of death would increase whether or not there were external enemies to “justify” the making of weapons. The fact that the war economy is a purely domes- dc affair of the corporate society was recently brought out in a series of questions addressed by a Harvard University instructor in a letter to the New York Times, questions which could not be answered within the corporate framework: “What Senator or Representative from New England would announce himself in favor of the immediate cancellation of all military electronics contracts? How would the powerful aircraft industry greet a proposal to discontinue the production of all war-planes and missiles? How many Congressmen could watch with equanimity as two million soldiers, sailors and airmen were released to flood the job market?

“How would the Pentagon react to the prospect of closing down West Point, Anapolis and the newly created Air Force Academy, pensioning off the officer corps, and sending home the Chiefs of Staff? Just how great would be the rejoicing as community after community, industry after industry, saw itself deprived of the contracts, installations, subsidies, which have meant economic life or death for the past twenty years?”[262] The “how” in each of the questions cannot be answered, because the society based on private profit can no longer survive without its war economy. Its only alternative would be to distribute its goods among those who need them, regardless of profits; if that were done, the United States would become an important member of a commonwealth of all mankind; if that were done, however, the United States would cease to be a capitalist society, and its Shareholders would have to seek productive employment because money would no longer “work” for them.

While Shareholders and their lawyers constitute the government, the possibility of world-wide distribution of goods is far-fetched. The war economy will be maintained, and to justify the war economy, enemies will be created. It is conceivable that, with the vast propaganda network at their disposal, the corporate rulers could convince the American population of the necessity of weapons even if the corporate society had no enemies. That, however, is not necessary. The enemies, the tension, and the pretext for war can be endlessly re-created and maintained. All around the globe, capitalists are engaged in taking the raw materials and cheap labor of a region, and leaving human misery in their train. The victims of corporate enterprise invariably seek a way out of their misery by means of rebellion and revolution, and after locating the central cause of their misery, the “natives” seek to expropriate the corporations. Whenever their victims rebel, the corporations invoke the International Communist Conspiracy, appeal to National Toughness, National Greatness, and National Defense, and again enlarge the military budget. Since the potential “field” for corporate enterprise is the entire world, and since the victims of the “enterprise” will rebel so long as they remain human, the tension, the “plots,” “threats,” and “conspiracies” by which the war economy is justified will be permanently available. And as the world’s “natives” become increasingly aware that the expropriation of corporations is within the realm of possibility, the “threats” and “conspiracies” against the corporate way of life become ever more frequent, International Communism is invoked with growing frenzy, war contracts and war profits climb inconceivably. By 1961, it already appeared that in a very near future the American people would be asked by their corporate rulers to “sacrifice” all projects which are not related to the manufacture of weapons and the planning of extermination.

The permanent war economy, though designed to maintain and perpetuate the corporate society, begets an unintended creature which in time turns against the hand that feeds it, and converts the society into a garrison state. The unintended creature is militarism, and the power which is given to the military, for the defense of corporate profit, threatens to overwhelm the very capitalists who have entrusted their fortune to military power. Although most of the military chiefs have been corporate capitalists, and although the entire military establishment is imbued with the ideology of profit, the morality of personal gain is nevertheless alien to the military hierarchy. Guided by a military definition of reality, by what C. Wright Mills has called the “military metaphysic,” the rulers of the corporate society have severely curtailed the chances of human survival. In the military metaphysic, the world is divided into two camps: allies and enemies. At first, every one opposed to corporate plunder was an enemy. Later, all men who protested against the hunger and misery of their own lands were added to the list of enemies. Today, even those who are opposed to American militarism are listed as enemies. Thus by 1960 the United States was committed to a “cold war” against the majority of mankind. Within the rules of the military metaphysic, foreign policy consists of a “game of poker” in which bombs are the cards and annihilation the outcome. Nonmilitary methods of solving problems are increasingly ruled out, and violence becomes the only response of which the United States is still capable. The technicians of annihilation are hired to “win wars,” and those among them who do not believe that nuclear wars can be “won” must perforce resign from their jobs. Thus the military hierarchy is manned by institutional lunatics who are prepared to launch a war which would mean the extermination of all life, while the “experts” in charge of American foreign policy confront every event on the globe with concepts of Deterrence, Retaliation, and Toughness. The “poker game” which the military’ technicians play is a terrible nihilism in which human considerations are irrelevant. Along with ancient Sparta, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the United States has become a military society whose sole “national purpose” is the death of human beings. With its war economy, its militarist attitude, and its orientation to violence, the United States does not substantially differ from Nazi Germany, except that the Nazi military’ machine did not have the power to destroy all life on earth. And the American population has been trained to unquestioning obedience. When sirens ring, the American people submissively crawl underground to “practice” for the day when the holocaust is set off. They will suffocate in their underground “shelters,” since the heat caused by an atomic explosion will suck up all the oxygen. The Americans still pay lip-service to the Christian hero Jesus of Nazareth who, if he lived today, would lead them to the chambers of the corporate rulers, turn over their “poker” tables, and hurl their weapons into the sea. But the American people do not travel in mass to their Pentagon to hound out the crackpot “realists” who play “poker” with their lives. The American people crawl obediently into underground “shelters.” And those few—very few—who refuse to “practice” for the annihilation of mankind, and refuse to crawl into the underground “shelters,” receive jail sentences in criminal courts from judges who are only enforcing the “laws” passed by their superiors. The Adolf Eichmann’s of America will doubtless plead they were only obeying the orders of their superiors, but there will be no audiences to hear their pleas. Judges and soldiers, scientists, engineers and weapon-makers, will all have been doing their jobs, obediently defending the corporate way of life, when all life is incinerated with thousand degrees of radioactive heat.

***

While the physical annihilation of all life has become the aim of corporate “foreign policy,” the psychological annihilation of human beings has become the aim of “domestic policy.” All human activity is trivialized, ideals are degraded, men are dehumanized, reason is put at the service of irrationality, and total annihilation is a game, in the society that calls itself The West and speaks of itself as a “civilization.”

The all-embracing nihilism of the garrison state is perhaps an unintended outcome of corporate “freedom,” but the negation of human needs and interests has always accompanied an aristocracy of wealth and privilege. Obviously “the few” can maintain their privileges only by taking them from “the mass of mankind.” Perhaps the peculiarity, as well as the power, of the American aristocracy, can be traced to the effectiveness with which the American people were trained to identity their interests with the interests of the rich. Previous aristocracies had openly avowed their plunder of the rest of humanity, and had claimed to have a right to plunder, generally “divine.” The capitalist aristocracy, however, did not avow its plunder; it claimed, in fact, to act in the interest of all other men. Thus, instead of banishing the ideals of other men, as previous aristocracies had done, the capitalists identified with those ideals, and claimed to fulfill them.

In the eighteenth century, the democratic ideals were not discarded, as the straightforward Hamilton and his aristocratic followers would have wanted. On the contrary, capitalists claimed the democratic ideals had been fulfilled by the capitalist coup d’etat of 1787. The aristocracy of wealth claimed to fulfill ideals and needs while at the same time manipulating those very ideals and needs.

For more than one and a half centuries, American capitalists have jusrifled the regime of profit-making by citing Elections, Representatives, and Political Parties. The subject has gathered so much fog during the history of American capitalism that it would be worthwhile to review the eighteenth century view of these institutions, and to try to ascertain whether capitalism fulfilled or betrayed them. In a democratic context, each was to participate in the creation of the human community. The imaginative insights of any man were to be judged in terms of their own value, not in terms of the man’s power or wealth. Since, however, there were too many citizens in the United States for all to meet in one place and enact their will directly, men delegated their powers temporarily to their peers, and the delegates were to be responsible representatives who would enact in small numbers what all would have done directly. Clearly these ideas were not located in an aristocratic context. No one was under the illusion that elections, representatives, or any other democratic institution could function democratically if an aristocracy of wealth existed. It was obvious that institutions designed to preserve equality and participation could have no meaning where there existed no equality or participation to preserve. Human history overflows with instances when the content of ideas changed; but in America the content of democratic ideas was actually reversed. The fact that men of wealth could not possibly be “representatives” that they would govern exclusively in the interest of wealth, was not first discovered by Karl Marx. The conservative second President of the Republic, John Adams, expressed himself unambiguously in this regard, “It is not true, in fact, that any people ever existed who loved the public better than themselves, their private friends, neighbors, &c. and therefore this land of virtue, this sort of love, is as precarious a foundation for liberty as honor or fear.”[263] Adams’ agrarian opponent John Taylor expressed this insight even more forcefully, “It is a matter of surprise that mankind should owe their greatest calamities to the two most respectable human characters, priests and patriots, from a political gluttony, like that of swallowing too much food, however good. If responsibility to God cannot cure priests of the vices which infect legislative parties of interest, what security lies in a responsibility to man? If the love of souls cannot awaken integrity, laid to sleep by this species of legislative patronage, will it be awakened by a love of wealth and power?[264] “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.”[265] Political parties and electoral machinery which flourished in an acquisitive context would invariably be founded on accumulation. Such parties and elections would become instruments of plunder. Ancient Rome had two parties, and it had elections, but ancient Rome has never been hailed as a model democracy. According to the Federalist Adams, “Speculation and usury kept the state in perpetual broils. The patricians usurped the lands and the plebians demanded agrarian laws. The patricians lent money at exorbitant interest and the plebians were sometimes unable and always unwilling to pay it. These were the causes of dividing the people into two parties, as distinct and jealous, and almost as hostile to each other, as two nations.”[266] And John Taylor analyzed America’s “two-party system” long before the system had acquired a history, and his observations were little short of prophetic, though perhaps any intelligent observer might have reached similar conclusions. Political parties, and the electoral machines by which they come to power, will not serve democratic purposes in an acquisitive society, but precisely the opposite: “...being in truth produced by the mass of property transferred by funding, banking and patronage, creating (to borrow Mr. Hume’s phrase) an aristocracy of interest, they yet exist, because these laws divided the nation into a minority enriched, and a majority furnishing the riches; and two parties, seekers and defenders of wealth, are an unavoidable consequence. All parties, however loyal to principles at first, degenerate into aristocracies of interest at last; and unless a nation is capable of discerning the point where integrity ends and fraud begins, popular parties are among the surest modes of introducing an aristocracy.”[267] Taylor’s conclusion is that political parties are an offshoot, not of America’s democratic ideal, but of its capitalist reality. “In whatever numerical class a government is arranged, a power of advancing the wealth of one part of the nation, by civil laws, will be used by its successive administrators to obtain a corrupt influence, wholly inconsistent with any good moral principles interwoven in a constitution, and certainly destructive of them.

“Every party of interest, whether a noble, a religious, or a military order; or created by a corrupting degree of legislative or executive patronage; or by usurping a power of regulating property by means of paper credit, charters or fraudulent wars; is the instrument and ally of the power by which its interest can be fed or starved. It must acquire an influence over legislation, both to do its own work, and the work of the power it serves.…

“This game between political and pecuniary parties, is precisely the cause by which free, moderate, and honest farms of government are destroyed...”[268] And worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that even those who may start their political career with a sincere desire to serve the public good, are corrupted after joining the institution and partaking of the plunder which the parties offer. “These parties plead patriotism to ignorance and credulity, and offer wealth and power to avarice and ambition. The most fraudulent is loudest in professions of zeal for the publick good... because the vicious principle of creating wealth by law, having debauched the minds of the audience, no dishonesty appears to be attached to any excesses of legislative robbery. Audacity or delusion at length inculcates an opinion, that he who refuses to surrender his conscience and his understanding to some party, is a knave or a fool; a knave, in pretending to honesty under a legislative distribution of wealth; and a fool, for preferring hopeless efforts to serve the publick, to his own aggrandizement at the publick expense. Thus the maxims taught by the legal intercourse between political and pecuniary parties reverse the dictates of common sense and common honesty. Knaves or fools only, surrender their duties and rights to part}’ despotism. Knaves, to get a share in its acquisitions; fools, because they are deceived. Can an honest man of sound understanding think himself bound by wisdom or duty, to give or sell himself to one of two parties, prompted by interest and ambition to impair the publick goodr Are men bound by wisdom or honor to take side with one of two competitors, if both are robbers or usurpers? On the contrary, as neither could succeed except by dividing the national force between them, a nation of fools only could be drawn into a division, in which the success of either party, is a calamity to a majority of both.... Parties, like usurpers, acquire nothing from each other. 1 he rich spoils of a gallant but deluded nation, were the fruits gathered by the whig and tory parties from the opinion—that it is knavery to adhere to the publick interest, and folly to exercise one’s own judgment. Thus election, designed to advance this interest, is converted into an instrument for parties; and that which is successful, hastens to reap the transitory harvest by legislative abuses, during the delirium of victory, until the crimes make room for a rival, equally unrestrained, which follows its precedents, repeats its frauds, and experiences its fate. By considering zeal for party as more wise or honorable, than a zeal for good or bad laws, a nation is thus perpetually suspended in a state of political warfare, pregnant only with aggravations and calamity.”[269]

The parties quickly ceased to reflect anyone’s ideals and became political factories for the production and sale of votes and candidates. And the dilemma of choosing “representatives” was “solved” by the appearance of the Party Boss. The Boss, whom Max Weber has appropriately called a political capitalist, is a man whose only interest in political issues is their popularity; for whom a principle is a commodity valued in terms of the votes it will fetch. Though himself neither elected nor selected nor approved by the public, he makes the choice of the candidates for whom the public will “vote.” The Boss chooses a candidate not for his principles but for his “appeal.” Generally tied, directly or indirectly, to the staggering American “underground” of gambling, racketeering and graft, the Boss will occasionally put up for election even a candidate who opposes Bossism and Graft, provided such a candidate can be made to “appeal” to the voters, and on condition that the candidate give up his pre-election rhetoric after the election. Idealism and dedication are never found in American politicians; such “sentimentality” cannot coexist with the Boss. Sociologists who are trained to believe this is Democracy claim to be appalled by the indifference and apathy the American citizen displays toward his Great Democratic Heritage. Apologists claim that through this process, “contending factions” somehow attain a “balance of interests.” There are many theories of Balance, ranging from the elementary-school textbook doctrine which equates the American widi the ancient Roman system of Checks and Balances brought about by “independent” executive, judicial and legislative departments, to the more esoteric sociological theories which claim that a “plurality of interests” “countervail” against each other and thus create a political balance similar to the economic “balance” achieved by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. What the elementary school theory does not teach the young is that if the same interests are in control of all the “independent departments” then there could be fifteen instead of three departments and the “checks and balances” would still favor the same group of men. And what the Sociologists forget to mention, as Adam Smith also forgot to mention, is that within the “plurality of contending factions,” the factions that contend most effectively are those that can financially afford to do so, and that the wealthiest have the best leverage for a favorable “balance.” The fact that the rich contend with each other for the greatest favors does not further the interests of the poor, either in America or in Rome. Under feudalism, too, factions of noblemen contended for the king’s favor, but this did not make feudalism democratic. As Taylor pointed out, this process is no more controlled by, nor more beneficial to the American population, than the laceration of an individual’s bowels is controlled by, or beneficial to the individual. “If you had seen the vulture preying upon the entrails of the agonized Prometheus, would you have believed, though Pluto himself had sworn it, that the vulture was under the control of Prometheus? If you could not have believed this, neither can you believe, that the concubinage between a government, and the system of paper and patronage, is an organ of national opinion, or of the wealth, virtue and talents of the nation, and not a conspiracy between avarice and ambition; because, it is as impossible that a nation should derive pleasure from a government founded in the principle of voraciousness, as the man from the laceration of his bowels.”[270]

Yet the laceration of the bowels has become systematic in the United States; it has become a science. Large “fields” of research and calculation investigate the means to manipulate the irrationality, gullibility’ and insecurity of American “voters” to get them to “eject” candidates on no issues whatever. Vast political machines exploit fear, envy, hatred, and desire for self-aggrandizement. This refinement and stimulation of the worst human traits is what remains of the “balance of conflicting interests.” The American Citizen is condemned to carry’ on activities he has not chosen and does not understand, while being “represented by the very men who plunder and manipulate him. Such a Citizen does not participate. He is used. Yet, unlike his revolutionary predecessors, the American Citizen does not rebel. He stands silently on long lines in the employment offices and waits patiently to be granted permission to work for one or another capitalist. Once hired, he does not question his boss’s right to employ (use) him; rather he is grateful to have found a capitalist who can use him. After all, the system is so vast, so all-pervading; the ideology is so effectively internalized. What is so obvious to an external observer is so befogged with a myriad of obscurities to those inside. If a factory owner asked “his” workers to “vote” on which of his two sons should be the next owner, the workers would laugh. If the capitalist then asked the workers to contribute from their wages to support this ceremony, the workers would refuse. If, after such an “election,” the capitalist claimed the workers had chosen the “representative” who should be boss over them, and consequently that the factory conditions are their own fault, that the capitalist is doing his best for them, the workers would seethe with indignation. And if, finally, the workers were told that the only way they could change their conditions would be “voting” for the capitalist’s other son at the election, the workers would rebel; they would demand that, if the factory conditions depend on them, then they should themselves run the factory. Of course, no capitalist would dare to claim that “his” workers run “his” corporation. Capitalists reserve this fantastic claim for the national government, and on that level the issues become so large, so obscure. The American people not only take their “ballot- boxes” seriously; they go obediently to them every two or four years to cast their votes; they give from their wages to support the parties; and in the end they are proud of the capitalists they’ve “elected” to run over them. And anyone who should call the bluff, who should dare to take the democratic professions seriously, can be called before the Subversive Activities Control Board to answer for the crime of having “dangerous thoughts”; anyone who should dare to urge men to discard the fraudulent “freedom” they’ve been brainwashed to accept, can be made to answer with his life in Democratic America. In the corporate society, each man is not the master of the conditions of his life; men do not share equal wealth, power and influence. As in the slave and serf societies of former times, masters set the conditions, and slaves fit themselves to the conditions; masters direct and control, while slaves do the work. Slaves are not participants in the creation of their community; they do not exert control over the important affairs of their society; even their right to life is a favor bestowed on them by their masters. The American atomic arsenal is described as a guarantee of Human Freedom and Dignity, as a protection of Democracy. Yet is this the democracy which can justify the burning of humanity with megaton bombs? Is this the freedom whose protection could warrant the taking of a single human life?

The taking of life is not a crime in the corporate society, provided it is taken on a large enough scale. Life has been de-valued; the degradation of human ideals has been accompanied by the dehumanization of men and the trivialization of men’s activities. In the corporate society, all activity has been reduced to market activity: the relations of buying, selling and profiting have imposed themselves into all facets of human life. Political activity as a means of changing the basic conditions of life does not exist in the land that lists Thomas Jefferson among its Founding Fathers. The conditions of corporate life—buying, selling, and profit-making—are accepted as God-given, eternal, and unchanging, and they are never questioned; they are accepted as if buying, selling and profit-seeking were the eternal patterns of all nature, and of the stars as well. With the conditions thus accepted and internalized, that is, within such an ideological context, politics becomes merely another means of acquiring wealth and power. As a result, American politics takes form in vast hierarchies of power with no overt political philosophy and no political purpose. The purpose of the political hierarchy is as unquestioned as the purpose of the corporate hierarchies of couriers and filing experts. Everyone is “in it” to get “his,” and no one cares what the whole damn thing is for. As in the corporate hierarchy, everyone in the political hierarchy serves someone else, and no one is responsible. Probably the Boss is the most powerful figure in the political hierarchy, but the Boss is not elected, he is not seen; according to official mythology, the Boss does not exist. (Occasionally the mythology is embarrassed, especially when certain bosses go out of their way to make public appearances and get their pictures in newspapers.) The Boss may have the power, but his interests are all nonpolitical; his function is to suck as much wealth as possible out of his machine. The more visible politicians have little to do with politics: they are business men and corporate lawyers, concerned with the profits of their corporations; political issues do not concern them except as possible threats to corporate profits, and in any case, caught as they are between boss, expert and bureaucrat, they can hardly feel urgency about problems that seem so remote. Below the politicians are the various types of administrators, judges, policemen, all of whom are concerned with the management and maintenance of existing power relations. From top to bottom, the political hierarchy is a system for preserving the social and economic relations of corporate capitalism. Those concerned with changing the conditions of life are excluded from American “politics.”

In the society devoted to buying, selling and profit-making, education and knowledge are reduced to financial “assets.” A student is someone who “invests” in education. An educated man is esteemed for the size of his income, the price of his car, the “name” of the school or corporation he works for, and the number of men he’s in charge of. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, are converted to instruments for the manufacture of commodities and weapons. The scientist, whom Western tradition had crowned Pursuer of Truth, today sells his knowledge to the corporation or military branch that hires him, and teachers of science train their students in the arts of making commodities and bombs. The scientist’s knowledge does not serve to ennoble, but to degrade man. And the scientist has been effectively taught that the use to which his knowledge is put is not his “field.” The useless gadgets, the megaton bombs, the poison gas, are graciously given over to the manikins in the corporate and political hierarchies. The scientist, too, is merely hired, and not responsible.

The great achievements of human imagination and reason are put at the service of irrationality. The pattern of capitalist production has become the model for all activity. The irrationality of production-for-profit has become all-pervading. Capitalist production is unplanned and uncoordinated; it has no view to human needs. More is produced than people can buy, and so to keep the market open, “obsolescence” is built into the goods so they will wear out quickly and have to be replaced. Capitalists outrun each other in producing what no one needs. The goal of all the activity is inhuman and absurd: the whole society is made to run a frantic race whose outcome is the profit of the rich. Yet every single phase of the process—the production, research, marketing, advertising—contains all the rationality and knowledge developed by millenia of human beings. The American educator Robert Hutchins described the process lucidly in an address he delivered in 1959. “Our real problems ... concealed from us by our current remarkable prosperity, which results in part from the production of arms that we do not expect to use, and in part from our new way of getting rich, which is to buy things from one another that we do not want at prices we cannot pay on terms we cannot meet because of advertising we do not believe.”[271]

The contrast between rational means and irrational ends has been termed by Paul Baran a clash between “micro-sense” and “macro-mad- ness.” Baran has pointed out that both parts of the relation advance simultaneously, thus leading human consciousness into absurdity at one end and meaninglessness at the other. “Whereas the irrationality of the whole must be constantly maintained if exploitation, waste, and privilege, if—in one word—capitalism is to survive, the rationality of society’s individual parts is enforced by the drive for profits and the competitive necessities of capitalist enterprise. Thus this partial rationality continually edges forward—albeit jerkily and unevenly—but the advance takes place at the cost of its being warped, perverted, and corrupted by the irrationality of the surrounding social order.”[272] This process is obviously hard on the human personality. A person trained to exercise his reason on details, as he perforce must be to carry out his task effectively, will naturally be disturbed when he confronts the irrationality of the entire process. The prevention and control of such disturbance is the crucial role Psychoanalysis plays in the corporate society. The psycho-analyst takes the irrationality of the profit-society for granted; his function is to “fix” those who do not take this irrationality for granted. The psychoanalyst seeks to “adjust” the personality to the “macro-madness” by means of “micro-sense.’’ How this is done, and the effect of the “treatment,” has been described by N.S. Lehrman, himself a psychoanalyst. “The analyst, ‘high in a tower up a chamber to the east,’ doubts the existence of harassment in the present, suspects the patient’s reaction is ‘paranoid’ and assumes that the roots of the fears of the present lie somewhere in the past. The patient accepts this concept and withdraws interest from the present in order to examine the past. Amorphously and sincerely, analyst and patient then go to work examining the latter’s childhood.

“The paralytic effectiveness of the treatment is maximized by the fact that both the patient and the analyst sincerely believe the treatment to be efficacious and scientific.

“And while the patient searches his past, the world goes on and opportunities are missed. I have often wondered what the role of the flourishing Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was in 1932 and 1933, with particular reference to the paralyzes of intellectuals of the Social Democratic Party.”[273]

Psychoanalysts confess the ineffectiveness of their “cure” on real mental patients. It is not mental illness they are equipped to “heal.” Their only targets are those persons who are fed up with capitalist “reality.” Since the Psychoanalysts are victims of capitalist ideology, as well as being hired and maintained by the corporate society’s masters, they cannot afford to question the human relevance of corporate capitalism. Consequently, they must attribute the irrationality of capitalism to the individual patient’s “subconscious.” That is their ideology. The psychoanalyst first of all reduces his “patient” to utter helplessness by “opening him up”—by allowing the “patient” to pour out the contents of his consciousness, systematically mixing trivialities together with choices and goals. After months of such “treatment,” during which an individual’s reason and self-control are thoroughly undermined, even the strongest can be driven into an imbecile fear of the inexistent “subconscious.” Once the individual’s faith in his own rationality is undermined, once he is made to believe that his ideals, thoughts and wishes all emanate from the uncontrollable pit the psychoanalyst calls the “subconscious,” the individual is paralyzed. Having reduced the “patient” to helplessness, the psychoanalyst then leads him back to “reality”—which means, to an unquestioning acceptance of all the irrationalities of the capitalist society. The individual so “treated” emerges with the belief that irrationality is the order of nature and society, and that those who demand rationality must be examined. The “patient” learns from his “treatment” to look with contempt on all criticism of the corporate society, because he now “knows” that the endless accumulation of gadgets, the bureaucratic crawl, the permanent war economy, the world misery, constitute “reality.” The effectively psychoanalyzed “patient” learns that one who criticizes “reality” does not “really” criticize the inhuman brutality of corporate capitalism, but merely expresses a “father complex” of one sort or another. And the “cured” individual learns from his psychoanalyst that the roots of the illness described by a critic are not to be sought in the society the critic describes, but are rather to be sought in remote, or even contrived, “incidents” in the critic’s childhood. Having channeled an individual’s concern with his community to a self-indulgent preoccupation with childhood memories and mythological “explanations,” the psychoanalyst proceeds to train his “patient” to spread the “cure” among other disaffected members of the corporate society. The only bright feature of psychoanalysis is that the Freudian theory on which it stands is neither original nor imaginative, and thus cannot, on its own merits, be spread very readily.

Community is banished, ideals are degraded, men are dehumanized—and cultural activity is trivialized. Culture is man’s permanent intellectual and imaginative contribution to human ennoblement. The corporate society can boast only great critics of its “way of life”; great spokesmen it has none. The literature, music and art of the corporate society are grounded on nihilism. Nihilism is not culture; it is a negation of culture. North America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, built on the outskirts of the corporate society, openly defiant toward corporate demands. The Crystal Palace does, however, have a pseudo-culture, the so-called Mass Culture, which is no culture at all, but a business. The mass culture is another means of acquiring wealth. Modeled on the capitalist industrial plant, mass culture consists of the manufacture of entertainment-commodities which are for sale to consumers. The goals are sale and profit; the effects are degraded intellects and infantile imaginations. That a vast and largely literate population could be trained to “consume” the “commodities” of the mass culture is nearly incredible. The conditioning of almost 200 million people into swallowing sham literature, sham music, sham art, as a substitute for genuine cultural creation, has no historical precedents. It was once thought that what Pavlov did with dogs could not be done with human beings, but capitalist achievements are not bound by human limits. If food is placed before a dog, the dog salivates. In one of his experiments, Pavlov placed food before a dog and simultaneously rang a bell: the dog salivated. He rang the bell at every meal-time, but did not always bring the food, yet the dog continued to salivate. Soon Pavlov rang only the bell, and did not bring the food, yet the dog still salivated. The dog had been “conditioned” to associate the bell with food; it had been taught to “digest” the bell instead of food. Once under the impression that the bell constitutes food, the dog would continue to “consume” the bell until it contentedly starved to death. In the corporate society, the American people are substituted for Pavlov’s dogs, and sham culture is the bell. Genuine culture-whether it is expressed in drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture—provides intellectual and emotional satisfaction by communicating content from artist to audience. In genuine culture, the words, sounds, movements, or forms, are irrelevant if divorced from the content. Yet in the corporate culture, the sounds and forms have been effectively dissociated from the content. Millions of Americans watch movies and television, listen to music, which has no content. They have been taught to consume words, sounds, movements and forms, in which nothing is communicated. They have been taught to salivate from the bell, to digest words without meaning and forms without content. Capitalists quickly applied this principle in their factories; guided by “industrial psychologists,” they painted factory walls and had music played during work-hours, so that workers would get the impression they were not working but relaxing, and could thus be made to work harder. Most of the big corporations have adopted paternalistic “benefit” programs which shower workers with insurances of different kinds, wage increases, paid vacations, relaxation rooms—all the trappings of life except life, all the “benefits” except meaningful participation. The workers salivate as if they were fed, but their intellects decay, their imaginations deteriorate, because the food they are given is not human nourishment. Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd, quotes surveys in which workers place Interest high on their list of needs. Interest cannot be provided without genuine sharing and participation. The workers are fed many “benefits,” and more are constantly added; yet, as Goodman points out, the job “is not interesting; it is not his, he is not ‘in’ on it; the product is not really useful.”[274] With the help of psychologists, palliative “benefits” are increased to quell all dissatisfaction; what is not given, and cannot be given by the corporate Holders, is human justification and relevance, what Goodman calls “the sense of being needed for one’s unique contribution.” The intellects and imaginations of Americans salivate from the bell and food need no longer be brought. The result is “a mind bemired in fact, an imagination beslimed with particulars.”[275] Yet a land of scientifically created imbecils cannot long survive; the cultural needs of men cannot long be suppressed without far-reaching repercussions. The salesmen of mass culture claim that the people “want” the type of food they are fed. No doubt Pavlov’s dog, after he learned to associate the bell with food, also “wanted” to “eat” the bell. By acquiring such a “want,” however, a dog starves to death.

***

An organized society, with all the complication and sacrifice it imposes on its members, can only be justified if it provides for the fullest possible creative and intellectual development of each individual. The corporate society, where reason serves no rational purpose, where “micro-sense” is devoted to “macro-madness,” cannot claim the respect of the individuals in it; consequently this society can maintain itself only by force, open or veiled, physical or psychological. When the corporate rulers can no longer respond to challenges except by violence and destruction, they have reached the limits of irrationality and nihilism. A society where even the active affirmation of human life is a crime has precedents in history: all the precedents were self-destructive, and all of them caused unspeakable misery and suffering before they flickered out. An individual who continues to affirm life, rationality and community, who refuses to prostrate his intellect and imagination to the regime devoted to genocide, has less chance of effectively realizing his ideals than in any previous dispensation. All the “avenues of truth” are clogged with big lies, all the means of creation and participation are dedicated to profits and annihilation. The society whose Declaration of Independence spoke of “the right of the people to alter or to abolish [their government], and to institute a new government,” has abolished the expression of that right except through revolution. Should a democratic revolution fail once more, the revolutionaries will not again be integrated into an “opposition party.” “Democratic America” today provides for its democrats only three terrible alternatives: impotence, exile, and martyrdom.

The terror and its meaning, however, are not yet visible to those within the confines of the corporate society. From the inside, the United States seems to be transforming itself into a rigid and stable society of ants; and in this sub-human form, Corporate America seems yet to be assured of an extended era of unchanging permanence. With men degraded into “hands,” with all natural and human resources devoted to the profit of owners, with mind mechanics policing and repairing misfits, the attainment of perfect adjustment and fixity seems to be the goal of Our Way of Life. Looking at the prospects of mankind from within the corporate walls, Roderick Seidenberg, in Posthistoric Man, predicted the condition of perfect fixity and rigid changelessness found among insects: “...in a period devoid of change, we may truly say that man will enter upon a posthistoric age in which, perhaps, he will remain encased in an endless routine and sequence of events, not unlike that of the ants, the bees, and the termites. Their essentially unchanged survival during some sixty million years testifies to the perfection of their adjustment, internally and externally, to the conditions of life: man mav likewise find himself entombed in a perpetual round of perfectly adjusted responses.”[276] According to Seidenberg, ants and bees have attained changeless permanence through the perfect integration of instinct; men would reach the same end through rational means. Already visible in the air-conditioned glass cages ofthe corporate couriers, where endless repetition is life’s only task, the “posthistoric” era will be marked by the smothering of creativity and the gradual disappearance of consciousness. “Curiously,” writes Seidenberg, “we seem to have returned, via the route of intelligence to the very status from which man departed, eons ago, under the undivided dominance of the instincts. For here, too, in the conditions of the future, the organism appears suspended within set responses, following interminably the selfsame patterns until altered by the slow processes of biologic mutations.... Consciousness depends upon a state of imbalance, a condition of tension. It is an awareness, in its widest and most intensified aspects, of that unstable equilibrium whose passing phases in the development of man we call history. Thus we are led to perceive that history itself, however inclusive we may conceive its sway, must be counted in reality as a high transitional era of relatively short duration in comparison with the slumbering eternity that preceded it, or the ever more static ages that will follow upon it. Consciousness will gradually evaporate and disappear in this posthistoric period, very much as it condensed step by step into ever sharper focus during man’s prehistoric era. In the ultimate state of crystallization to which the principle of organization leads, consciousness will have accomplished its task, leaving mankind sealed, as it were, within patterns of frigid and unalterable perfection. In this consummation we perceive the essential meaning of the posthistoric period of man’s development.... Unerringly, his drive toward conformity will guide him into an ever more static condition of fixity and permanence; and the perfection of his adjustment will come to be synonymous with a slow but ultimate fading out of his consciousness. His triumph will be complete, and by that very token his awareness, no longer necessary, will evaporate, leaving only a fixed routine of actions whose perfect suitability will erase all memory of thought.”[277] The “posthistoric” society will have no art, no philosophy, no culture, because creative intellectual syntheses will not be “rational” within its confines.

The condition of fixity and permanence predicted by Seidenberg is far from being realized. Though Seidenberg brilliantly depicts the appearance of corporate capitalism with all its goals fulfilled, he commits the fallacy of identifying capitalist goals with human goals and capitalist “reason” with human reason, and thus builds his conclusions on partial premises. The state of permanent fixity will not be attained precisely because of what Seidenberg himself illustrates. Taking the marketing, research, advertising and manipulation as human sense, and taking the irrational cycle of production for corporate profit as the aim of humanity, Seidenberg projects this “rationality” into a future of fixity and permanence. Yet it is precisely the identification of capitalist reason with human reason, of corporate sense with human sense, that will prevent the perfect and unchanging fixity Seidenberg predicts. For, as Paul Baran lucidly observed, Seidenberg is not alone in identifying corporate reason with human reason; his contemporaries too are “afflicted with ‘common sense’ that is studiously nurtured by all the agencies of bourgeois culture and the principal injunction of which is to take capitalist rationality for granted,... [and they] can hardly avoid identifying the rationality of buying, selling, and profit- making with reason itself.”[278] And since Seidenberg’s contemporaries are still human beings—they are not yet manufactured in bottles to fit corporate specifications—they will still react in human ways against corporate “reason,” and by reacting they will rebel and thus destroy Seidenberg’s fixity. As Baran points out, man’s “revolt against capitalist rationality, against the rationality of markets and profits, thus becomes a revolt against reason itself, turns into anti-intellectualism, and promotes aggressiveness toward those who manage to capitalize on the rules of the capitalist game to their advantage and advancement. It renders him an easy prey of irrationality.”[279] Many of Seidenberg’s contemporaries do in fact obediently “adjust” to the system; if they were the corporate society’s only inhabitants, Seidenberg’s prediction would no doubt be a good guess. But “adjustment,” or submission, is only one possible response to corporate “reason”: other possible responses are escape, rebellion, and destruction. Paul Goodman has labeled the responses to corporate absurdity resignation, beat and crime. (All three are negative responses; Goodman would doubdess grant the possibility of a fourth, a positive response, namely creative rebellion.) If beat and crime were responses restricted to a few odd misfits, the misfits could easily be put aside and corporate fixity could still be attained. But these responses are not restricted, because within an irrational dispensation every man is a potential “misfit.” In so far as he retains vestiges of human consciousness and imagination, every man in the corporate society can become beat or criminal. It is this fact that prevents the perfect integration and permanent fixity predicted by Seidenberg.

The destructive responses, while preventing the perfect integration and eternization of corporate capitalism in the form of a changeless insect society, do not, however, ensure the survival of humanity. On the contrary, destructive criminality at the top of the corporate society would mean the annihilation of mankind. A criminal response to corporate nihilism is itself a nihilistic response. The criminal, by taking capitalist “reason” as human reason, rejects both simultaneously and turns to irrationality. He finds a model of irrational self assertion at the top of the same corporate structure whose lower-level rationality he rejects. In other words, the criminal rejects the “micro-sense’ of the corporate society, and turns instead to its “macro-madness.” At this point, American juvenile delinquency and political practice meet: the gangs of juvenile delinquents are miniature mirrors of the Pentagon and the State Department; the young criminals enact on a city block the same “policies” the United States government carries out on a world scale. The top responds irrationally because it takes the “macromadness” for human sense, the bottom because it rejects the corporate “micro-sense” and seeks salvation in madness. Those at the top take capitalist reason for granted, and in a world where men are throwing out capitalist “reason” for human goals, they fear the collapse of their “way of life”; yet since they identify corporate capitalism with life itself, they can only react with a frantic appeal to nationalist tribalism and its consequent fear, hatred, destruction and terror. Those at the bottom reject human reason along with capitalist reason in a grand irrational sweep, and they can only respond by destroying achievements and annihilating life. When annihilation becomes not onlv thinkable, but the main goal of human activity, consciously pursued at both the top and bottom levels of the corporate society, then the tempo of criminal breakthroughs increases and destroys all corporate hopes of permanence and fixity. In this sense, Dostoyevsky’s fantastic prediction of a resurgence of barbarism in the midst of technological abundance, realized already once in this century, is far more ominous than Seidenberg’s prediction, which will remain no more than a selfdestructive tendency. What Dostoyevsky foresaw, a century ago, was that the psychological extinction of human beings would have to be preceded by total physical annihilation, and that men would arise to implement this program. “I would not be at all surprised, for instance, if suddenly and without the slightest possible reason a gendeman of an ignoble or rather a reactionary and sardonic countenance were to arise amid all that future reign of universal common sense and, gripping his sides firmly with his hands, were to say to us all, ‘Well, gendemen, what about giving all this common sense a mighty kick and letting it scatter in the dust before our feet simply to send all these logarithms to the devil so that we can again live according to our foolish will?’ That wouldn’t matter, either, but for the regrettable fact that he would certainly find followers: for man is made like that....”[280] The political “realists,” the war experts, the bureaucratic terrorists, have joined hands with the hoodlums and juvenile criminals in capitalism’s last grand enterprise, that of “giving all this common sense a mighty kick and letting it scatter in the dust before our feet...”

Nihilist rejection, in the form of gang crime and nuclear barbarism, is the main response to corporate irrationality, and by far the most dangerous. The nihilist mentality grows like an uncontrollable cancer, and spreads with greatest force especially to the chambers where the weapons of death are kept. The greatest danger to human life is the frenzy with which the corporate dominant minority reacts to the growing circle of disaffection and anti-capitalist revolution around the world. The disaffection is the outcome of corporate plunder, yet to cope with it the corporate rulers can resort only to violence; the violence, in turn, increases the number of victims, and thus enlarges the circle of disaffection. As a result, disaffection with corporate capitalism and its “freedom” takes place on all grounds at every turn. Clearly revealed during the Cuban debacle was the fact that the corporate “elite” are fully aware that men will no longer submit to corporate “freedom.” Also clearly revealed was the fact that the corporate bosses will not calmly accept a slave rebellion, but will strike out with all the frenzy, the hatred, the destruction, of the caged beast. Capitalists are now aware that it is not merely a few profits that are at stake, but their entire structure of privilege.

Thus while each revolution gives life and hope to an increasing number of men, each defection at the same time aggravates the possibility of total annihilation. Yet, faced with death, and confronted with the choice between continuing submission and revolution, men everywhere are choosing revolution. Most of the rebellions take place within the capitalist-imposed confines of nationalism, bureaucratism and specialism, but they do take place, and they do open to men the possibility to create societies with genuine creative participation. The corporate rulers interpret every revolution as an incursion into their “free world,” and with every incursion their frenzy grows. To protect their vanishing privileges, the capitalists increasingly surrender even those very privileges to their military establishment on the delusion that a vast campaign of annihilation will preserve corporate privilege intact.

While the negative, destructive responses are tangible and all- pervading, the positive, constructive responses are as yet intangible, half-formulated, and utopian. In the era of technological barbarism, crime is much easier than revolution, and spreads much further. It took only one American atomic bomb to annihilate Hiroshima, while it takes the ingenuity, wisdom and good will of many men, all intensely aware of the accumulated experience of generations, to build a community where technology is made to serve human ends. It takes far less motion to use a knife for killing than for carving and sculpting. It takes far less ingenuity or intelligence to destroy than to create. It takes far less effort for “realists” to maintain a permanent war economy than for “idealists” to create a peace economy, because it is far easier to submit to criminality than to rebel against it. The history of obedience and submission is a history of outrage and crime; it is a history of war, of military oppression, of police brutality. The history of rebellion and revolution is not without its violence and hatred, but violence is not its aim, and its hatred is short lived. As defined by Camus, rebellion is an affirmation of human life; the recourse to violence is thus the betrayal, not the fulfillment, of rebellion. Oppression gives birth to rebellion; the same oppression, through violence and terror, forces rebellion to defend itself with violence, and thus tinge itself with the very oppression that gave it birth. Yet, clearly, to abolish the violence, it is the oppression that must be eliminated. Men all over the world are at last realizing that obedient submission to oppression only heightens oppression, and they are turning to rebellion to affirm life and community. It is this fact that gives hope to human survival and encouragement to creative action. The radicals{7} of today are at last divorcing themselves from the conservative “movements” that speak the language of radicalism while clinging to corporate privileges. Whether in Europe or in America, the radicals of today have more in common with the revolutionaries of Cuba, China, India, Africa and Latin America, than they do with the wise and weary old cynics who still call themselves the local Left. Creative rebels aim at the abolition of corporate plunder and the prevention of the capitalist war of total annihilation as the prime requirements for regeneration; these rebels have nothing to do with the conservatives of the one-time “American Left,” with the British Labor movement, with the European “Social Democrats,” with the anti-communist “socialists,” with the no-action “pacifists” or with the noisy “liberals” whom C. Wright Mills has called the “NATO Intellectuals.”

The circle of disaffection is spreading even within the corporate society itself, in spite of the fact that in “freedom loving” America the choice of radicalism renders one a pariah, an outcast as untouchable as the lowest caste of old India. Thomas Jefferson’s advice and warning can now be read as an ominous prophecy in the land where the democratic revolution failed: “Each generation ... has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes the most promotive of its own happiness.... A solemn opportunity of doing this every 19 or 20 years should be provided by the constitution. This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone.... If this avenue be shut..., it will make itself heard through that of force, and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppressions, rebellions, reformations; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on forever.”[281] In America, critics of the ruling class are as unprotected from harassment and persecution as in any tyranny in history; the persecution is not only carried on by the Government, but has now been pronounced “consistent” with the Bill of Rights by the Supreme Court of the land. In America, radicalism which aims to unseat the corporate aristocracy is labeled “communist conspiracy” and is now punishable by life imprisonment or even death. One of the Supreme Court Justices who dissented from sanctioning political persecution made a lucid comparison between the frenzy of capitalists during John Adams’ administration and that of today: “...the Federalist Sedition Act ... did not go as far in suppressing the First Amendment freedoms of Americans as do the Smith Act and the Subversive Activities Control Act. All the fervor and all the eloquence and all the emotionalism and all the prejudice and all the parade of horrors... were not sufficient in 1798 to persuade the members of Congress to pass a law which would directly and unequivocally outlaw the party of Jefferson, at which the law was undoubtedly aimed. The same arguments were then made about the ‘Jacobins,’ meaning the Jeffersonians, with regard to their alleged subservience to France, that are made today about the Communists with regard to their subservience to Russia.”[282] In mid-twentieth century America, there are probably as many “conspirators” and “dangerous ideas,” and as many police organizations and “investigatory bodies” to cope with them, as ever in history; censorship, spying and informing have not only become respectable practices, but are among the big expenses of the United States government. Yet the circle of heresy continues to spread.

The old Left in America was effectively emasculated and rendered impotent by the inhuman persecution of the past fifteen years, persecution whose brutality is equaled in recent history by the Nazi persecution of Jews. Communists, though rarely very radical, were chosen as the scapegoats of the persecution. One-time communists and friends of one-time communists were hounded out of their homes and jobs and communities and forced to denounce former comrades. So-called “spies” were persecuted, jailed and murdered in peace-time, and highly respectable scientists and educators were thrown from their posts and ostracized for long-forgotten “associations” with communists. Faced with such vicious persecution, the communists, who are only human, retorted with an inflexible rigidity and held on for dear life to a thoroughly idealized picture of their Soviet Heaven, much as in former times persecuted Europeans had clung to a thoroughly’ exaggerated picture of “Free, Democratic America.” Homeless, the communists could not have survived; yet by placing their faith in an unreal “place” which did, in reality, have a history, and did, after all, confront unsolved human problems, they survived at a tremendous price. The price of survival for American communists was rigidity; in the struggle to stay alive, they lost the great gifts they had inherited from Marx, the ability to think, analyze and clarify. Yet, utterly rejected and ostracized, they could not help but hurl defensive slogans that had long lost content, and frantically affirm everything Soviet as good. The victims ofNazi persecution did not emerge with sharpened intellects and sensitive imaginations either; brutal persecution deadens not only its perpetrators, but its victims as well.

Rendered impotent and rigid by vicious oppression, the communists had yet to suffer the further humiliation of seeing friends and comrades, as well as other “socialists,” turn on them with a brutality even greater than the government’s. This bizarre phenomenon probably has no equal since the Middle Ages, when men who were labeled “heretics” suddenly found themselves feared and hated even by their one-time friends. Now, as then, the fear of “heresy” and contamination is motivated by an irrational desire to save one’s “soul,” a fear which is nurtured by organized religion. America is an atheist country in terms of personal hope and faith, in terms of love and brotherhood, it is the world’s greatest repository of atheism—yet America has adopted the most brutal institution of organized religion, namely the demonolog)’. In America, a doctrine, as well as its spokesmen, have been attributed to the Devil, and an American does not consider himself “safe” if he does not periodically denounce the Devil’s doctrine, and if he does not reserve for its spokesmen a contempt and hatred he does not even express towards animals and things. Anti-communism is the only religion of atheist America, and its practice is not restricted to the “average man,” the victim of the propaganda media, but has infected and rendered impotent the remains of the old Left. American “socialists,” frightened out of their wits by the persecutions of communists, and deathly afraid to be swallowed up by the rigidity with which their onetime comrades responded to the persecutions, fell into an equally rigid posture and spent the remainder of their careers persecuting communists with greater brutality and intolerance than that of Congressmen. The non-socialist sector of the old Left is also rendered impotent by the anti-communist mania, and is beset as well by “unconditional pacifism.” This is a highly refined doctrine which holds that any rebellion is bad because it brings violence, and consequently acquiescence and inaction are the only moral alternatives. Though rarely held in its pure form, the doctrine’s greatest function is to pacify so-called “liberals.” Since some form of violence will be found everywhere, since even a strike may be defined as a form of sabotage, since no resistance will ever be “pure,” the outcome is non-action, which means passive acceptance of existing oppression. Gandhi’s precept that it is less cowardly to resist oppression with violence than not to resist at all does not penetrate the cowardly consciousness. This type of “pacifism” is not pacifism; it is self-righteousness masquerading as morality: it is not a rejection of violence, oppression and war, but rather a rejection of all effective resistance to violence, oppression and war. Thus beset by many types of “radicals” who are not radical, the old Left: will continue impotent so long as it continues paying attention to the tired conservatives in its midst. Continually confronting the world’s biggest problems, the old Left has neither unity, nor program, nor plan of action— nor solidarity nor support—above all, no hope or promise.

A comparison of revolutions leads to the conclusion that every revolution is a break-through: it is unprecedented; its causal sequence is not predictable; it is unique. Radical action can define the objectives and prepare the ground; it can have a program and a plan of action; but it cannot have a blueprint, because a blueprint would be outdated from one day to the next. The patterns of one revolution are applicable to another only symbolically; the accumulated experience of revolutions is susceptible to imaginative analogy, not to transplantation: a tropical plant will not grow in the Arctic. So far, social revolutions have concerned themselves with the technological, educational and cultural development of regions, and have thus been able to pursue their aims within national boundaries and nationalist concepts. There will no doubt continue to be regional, nationalist revolutions so long as the inequality between regions, the political barriers between them, and the contrived national loyalties continue to exist. It is clear, however, that the biggest problems of our time, corporate plunder and the war of total annihilation, cannot be dealt with in nationalist confines. The victims of corporate plunder are not restricted to anv region: they are in the United States, in Latin America, in all the world’s “underdeveloped nations”; the neutralists of Laos, the social revolutionaries of Cuba are victims of continuing terror and invasion; even the remote and stable Russians and Chinese are forced by corporate militarism into military postures which threaten to overwhelm their achievements. The nuclear war of annihilation is not a problem confined to a region or even a continent: Indonesians, Tahitians and Eskimos, as well as unborn generations, would all be affected. It is no longer clear that the inhabitants of the corporate society have a better opportunity of dealing with these problems than those “outside”: the American government now keeps elaborate files on all its “dangerous inhabitants”[283] and has the power to remove and isolate all “dangerous,” meaning effective, critics. Is it even clear, for example, that a general strike of all humanity against the corporate war economy could not be organized with greater ease than a general strike of American workers? Early in this century, the international solidarity of radicals was discarded because of historical necessity; yet clearly, when plunder and war are carried out in a National Interest, antinationalism becomes once more an aim of revolution; the international solidarity of radicals has now become a historical necessity. The issues are no longer regional but world-wide; from one “nation” to another, the problems differ in degree, not in kind; the degradation of human beings for a few men’s privilege, the “protection” of privilege by annihilation, are not parochial institutions that affect only a small sector of the world’s population; they are the central concerns of all mankind. Even regional development within nationalist confines cannot effectively be carried out while terrorism and sabotage threaten every accomplishment. Internal disaffection and external defection from corporate “freedom” are not two separate revolutions; they are two facets of the same revolution, and neither can succeed if it betrays the other. Plunder, war, and the nationalism under whose guise they are carried on, cannot effectively be opposed with plunder, war and nationalism. If men are to become fully engaged in the construction of peace, culture and community, they will risk exile, imprisonment and death. The risk will not be taken, it will not be worthwhile, until peace means the recognition of the importance of ever)’ human being, until culture is grounded on the equal accessibility of the means of life to every man, until community provides for untrammeled criticism, complete development and creative participation by all, and for all men.

June 1961

New York City

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.

Chronology :

November 30, 1960 : Chapter 5 -- Publication.

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