Colonized by Corporations

Colonized by Corporations

By Chris Hedges
Common Dreams.org
May 14, 2012

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter
called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.”

In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt,
the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury
on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a
despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own
political class.

The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls
the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity
of colonial oppression.

The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns
between candidates who each are servants of colonial power,
Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing
the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people.

Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never
seriously addressed.

“The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent
those few who are prone toward political action from organizing
into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer
the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We
have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized.

We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty
to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism
are traitors.

They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and
enrich themselves at our expense.

The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the
Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon
called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans.

The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to
subsistence level.

The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as
labor unions, are dismantled.

The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a
superior education.

Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well
as criminalize dissent.

And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend
by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment
benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy
toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney
or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an
attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates,
but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political
process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks.

It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance
to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate
power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to
foster the common good.

But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must
accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed.

We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of
our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure
itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor.

The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do
not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become
cannon fodder.

The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals,
those educated middle-class men and women who are barred
by a calcified system from advancement.

Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms,
lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists
without newspapers descend economically.

They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge
between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they
are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite.

What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between
what people expect from their lives and what is offered.
This is especially acute among the educated and the talented.

They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied
what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And
the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying
is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to
ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student
debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of
power.

Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that
perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America,
Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from
déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or
middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their
professional and personal aspirations.

They were never part of the power elite, although often their
parents had been. They were conversant in the language of
power as well as the language of oppression.

It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that
makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United
States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil
and JPMorgan Chase.

They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the
uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of
corporations by the public relations industry.

These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in
economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power,
real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the
criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power
structure.

He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white
power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of
economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view.

Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until
we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us,
with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than
useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said.

“When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free,
and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe
that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy,
brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re
my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe
you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a
Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that
enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed.

They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat
into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They
devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as
possible.

They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly
disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of
Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers.

The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This
is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes.

Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of
nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do
to their shareholders.

A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own
longevity.

It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to
ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face
of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for
years,” Alexander Herzenwrote, “but it is hard for them ever to
lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession
of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people."

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the
elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because
they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets
charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with
protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a
decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress
rehearsal in 1905.

The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution,
have been largely nonviolent.

There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and
assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages,
more than help revolutions.

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution
condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only
demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers
and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests.

The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather
Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army
arose in the ferment of the 1960s.

Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression.
They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the
goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an
isolated and discredited ruling class.

These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for
personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence,
but they do little to advance the cause.

The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien
Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions.

They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow
revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of
the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in
building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the
widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for
justice and fairness that is essential to all successful
revolutionary movements.

The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not
go away.

It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of
the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems
of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through
habit, routine and inertia.

The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed
experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites,
are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements.

They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors.
They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The
assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult
for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly
hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival.

Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle
of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is
almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon
wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.”

“When they are presented with evidence that works against that
belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a
feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive
dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core
belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that
doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the
organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon
the elites and join the revolutionaries.

This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter
how sophisticated the repressive apparatus.

Once those who handle the tools of repression become
demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent.

Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in
minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported
leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death.

Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies
comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little
or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as
was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia.

At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back,
the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American
Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including
George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army.

Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by
Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as
Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount
widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda
and acts of civil disobedience.

The object is to try to get there without violence.

Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us,
are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs.

Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik
wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.”

And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of
victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution,
a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct
all our energy and commitment.

If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be
destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it.

The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we
are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and
only hope.

The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the
parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the
1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes
in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours.

Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time
or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your
polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just
enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get
back out onto the street.

That is where the question of real power is being decided.


Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/14-3