October 2020 – Farm Job Advice

A relentlessly dark indictment of global capitalism

By Thomas Carothers

September 14, 2018 at 7:00 a.m. CDT

Thomas Carothers is senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Building on several previous books presenting damning critiques of American society, in “America: The Farewell Tour,” Chris Hedges lays out his full manifesto: a comprehensive account of what he believes to be the devastating effects of capitalism on the United States and in fact the entire world. The book stands more vividly as a window into one of the renewed tribes of American politics in the Trump years than as a persuasive, cogent argument based on careful deployment of evidence and analysis.

The tribe in question is the anti-capitalist left, enjoying something of a moment these days in response to the political gains of the populist right. Its main tenets are the same as in the last heyday of this outlook, the 1960s and 1970s, updated to match today’s socioeconomic and political conditions. Central among these is the argument that capitalism is an inherently destructive force that rots and ruins every arena of American life.

(Simon & Schuster)

The corporate state that presides over this destructive capitalist economic system is ruthless and relentless. “It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as forms of social control while it cannibalizes the nation and the globe for profits.”

This scourge is all-consuming. Once-liberal institutions, including “the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” have all “collapsed under sustained assault during the past forty years of corporate power.” Today, there are “no institutions left in America that can authentically be called democratic.”

It is terminal. “Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two.”

And it is worldwide. “The malaise that infects Americans is global.” Global capitalism is responsible for all misery and the metastasizing of violent rage from many different sides, from jihadists and neofascists to far-right militias and antifa.

Hedges portrays this nightmarish situation as the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s prediction of the eventual end of capitalism. This vision of capitalism’s demise is slightly puzzling, given that in his account, capitalism seems to be steamrollering everything in its path. But he argues that all this winning is only serving to make clear capitalism’s fundamental hollowness and deceit, which represent the seeds of its ultimate destruction.

The most engaging parts of the book are the searing portraits he presents of individuals victimized in six arenas that he explores in detail: drug addiction, pornography, gambling, the criminal justice system, extremist groups and the search for meaningful, well-paid work. He takes the reader inside these issues in ways that are often telling and memorable, and sheds light on a variety of troubled U.S. cities along the way, from Scranton, Pa., and Camden, N.J., to Rockford, Ill.

Yet this exploration of American society is unrelieved in its negativism. It is clear that in his travels around the country, Hedges never crossed paths with James and Deborah Fallows while they were researching their recent illuminating book, “Our Towns,” on places thriving in notable ways. And for every problem Hedges encounters — whether racism, sexism, addiction or political intolerance — capitalism is always to blame. After poignantly recounting how a drug-addicted young woman endured repeated sexual assaults while working as a prostitute, Hedges writes: “This is how the Wall Street gamblers . . . want it. The hell of the poor is their playground.”

It is striking that what seeks to be a sweeping critique of right-wing populism ends up echoing some of its core characteristics. Hedges excoriates followers of the Christian right as “Manichaeans” who view the world in good-and-evil terms, but then he demonizes his political opponents and invokes black-and-white dichotomies with a cringe-worthy lack of self-reflection. He recommends that the left not ridicule Trump supporters, only to characterize them several pages later as a basket of “half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants.”

Similarly, Hedges’s economic vision strongly resembles that of President Trump. A recurring motif is his comparison of shuttered U.S. factories to the ruins of a once-great civilization as he documents how automation and offshoring have turned former manufacturing hubs into ghost towns. He evinces a relatively simplistic vision for economic revival based on restoring manufacturing jobs, ignoring models of growth beyond the traditional manufacturing sector.

Also similar to the Trumpian worldview is Hedges’s deep-seated belief that real power in the United States resides in a permanent, unelected elite intent on ripping off average Americans. Hedges, too, posits the existence of a potent “deep state,” but one that empowers corporate bloodsuckers and war-thirsty generals. The ruling elite employs America’s surveillance state to “track our movements,” while platforms like Google “steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive, or antiwar sites.”

As to the way forward, for Hedges, only one approach is possible: determined civic resistance that confronts capitalism head on. He presents the Standing Rock protests of 2016-17 against the Dakota Access Pipeline as a template for such resistance, highlighting their nonviolent, sustained and highly organized nature, as well as their grounding in inspirational cultural traditions. And this resistance will necessarily be global. “Bonds of solidarity and consciousness will unite the wretched of the earth against our global corporate masters.”

As tends to be the case with clarion calls to global socialist revolution, the reader is left not just reeling from the unrelieved darkness of the verdict against capitalism but wondering about some basic questions. What exactly will the revolution look like? How will small-scale activist movements gain the power necessary to defeat the global capitalist machine? And perhaps most important, what forms will the socialist answer take that are different from the tragically flawed attempts of the 20th century to achieve anti-capitalist alternatives?

America

The Farewell Tour

By Chris Hedges

Simon & Schuster. 388 pp. $27

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-relentlessly-dark-indictment-of-global-capitalism/2018/09/13/ab8cbe98-ac84-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html

Also

Watch – Chris Hedges “The Politics of Cultural Despair”

Oct 18, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxSN4ip_F6M

And

Watch – Chris Hedges “The Politics of Cultural Despair”

95,892 views • Oct 18, 2020

https://youtu.be/GxSN4ip_F6M

Author, activist and dissident Chris Hedges spoke at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY on October 16, 2020. In this talk he examines the cultural and social forces that have given rise to extremism in the United States. He explores the myriad of factors that led to the proliferation of neo-fascist militias, extremist organizations, demagogic leaders, vast social divides defined by hate, a hyper nationalism and virulent racism as well as a mass media that has descended into burlesque and fans the flames of social disintegration. Meghan Marohn moderates a Q&A following the talk.

This from the conclusion of the talk/article:

Peter Drucker observed that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

Once the internal enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict and a steady stream of victims. Every new crisis becomes more urgent and more extreme than the last. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and spectacle become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder, as the federal marshals who wantonly gunned down the antifia activist Michael Forest Reinoehl in Washington State illustrated, becomes heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues.

What these crisis cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. There is no ideological consistency. There is only emotional consistency. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The ruling elites will no more restore these ruptured social bonds and address the deep despair that grips America than they will respond to the climate emergency. As the country unravels, they will reach for the familiar tools of state repression and the ideological prop provided by Christian fascism.

It is up to us to carry out sustained acts of nonviolent, mass resistance. If we mobilize in large and small ways to fight for an open society, to create communities that, as Vaclav Havel wrote “live in truth,” we hold out the possibility of pushing back against these crisis cults, holding at bay the brutality that accompanies social upheaval, as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge that our systems of governance are incapable of being reformed. No one in power will save us. No one but us will stand up for the vulnerable, the demonized and the earth itself. All we do must have the single aim of crippling the power of the ruling elites in the hopes of new systems of governance that can implement the radical reforms to save us and our world.

The most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once acknowledge the bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair. And we will only do this through faith, the faith that the good draws to it the good, that all acts that nurture and protect life have an intrinsic power, even if the empirical evidence shows that things are getting worse. We will find our freedom, our autonomy, our meaning and our social bonds among those who also resist, and this will allow us to endure, and maybe even triumph.

Please support The Sanctuary for Independent Media! For more information and to donate, visit:
https://www.mediasanctuary.org

You can find the text of this talk here:

https://scheerpost.com/2020/10/19/chris-hedges-the-politics-of-cultural-despair/

Special thanks to Rich Mavrogeanes and Discover Video for their support.

Month: October 2020

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[The Washington Post] Review | A relentlessly dark indictment of global capitalism

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Watch – Chris Hedges “The Politics of Cultural Despair”

Watch – Chris Hedges “The Politics of Cultural Despair”