The millions of Americans, like yours truly, who work in the corporate or public sector white collar world have already grown accustomed to a loss of personal privacy and a degree of social control that make Pentagon data mining look like an ACLU fundraising dinner.Kim Stanley Robinson has described the American lifestyle as one where we live in an unjust, feudal state for the vast majority of our lives, only to occasionally vote on the label the oppression wears. And we call it "democracy." In reality, we live the majority of our lives in a state with no democracy, and the possibility of punishments that, were they administered by the state, would be unconstitutional.
We know our phone calls and emails may be and often are monitored, that company net nannies will stop us from visiting certain web sites (and not just porn pages: I’ve been blocked out of labor union sites, progressive political sites – even that notoriously subversive left-wing web magazine, Slate.)... We know what a cult of personality looks like, because it looks like our CEO....
It’s true that however bad it may be, the corporate workplace is only an 8-hour police state, one you can tunnel free of every night. But it is a training ground of sorts, a place where habits of thought and social roles are acquired and reinforced – patterns that are then reflected in the popular culture. The lesson learned is submission to authority, or at least the passive acceptance of hierarchical relationships. It teaches people to be good bureaucrats, and good bureaucrats understand that if the organization is tapping phones – or infecting test subjects with syphilis or dumping toxic waste in rivers or shipping undesirable people off to concentration camps – it must have a good reason.
It's tempting to look at the flows of wealth both within a country and between countries - essentially the same story: Wealth flows uphill - and come to a nasty conclusion about capitalism. I could, in a bad mood, describe capitalism as just as unjust and confiscatory a regime as anything a small-time despot like Castro or Chavez would dream of. Indeed, this has been the rationale used by confiscatory politicians in the past. If I'm being screwed by a large, faceless entity, I might as well be given some say, even if it's a fig leaf.
Of course, there's the little problem of history. I could be a much more ardent socialist if I didn't know about the Great Leap Forward, the War against the Kulaks, not to mention the Cultural Revolution.
That said, I can't help but wonder what people thought about the idea of secular, democratic governments in the 1840s or so. The first European attempt - France - had been an unmitigated disaster, and that was before Napoleon came around. By the late 1840s, the US was pretty obviously headed towards disaster over the issue of slavery. And the rest of the more-democratic-than-not governments were still a) incredibly corrupt and b) tightly controlled by the elite anyway. Given those facts, how would we have judged democracy's future prospects in the next century?
3 comments:
Chavez a despot?
This is a man who has won eight elections and referenda in as many years, each time increasing his majority. He is one of the world's most popular leaders, a fact that allowed him to survive a US-backed coup in 2002.He has far greater popular support than Bush, Blair or Harper.
In his first year as president in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution - in which 71% of the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave citizens unheard-of freedoms, such as for the first time recognising the human rights of mixed-race and black people.
Chavez is far from being a despot. Yet the propaganda of "developed" countries portrays him as such, fearing that citizens may demand the same sort of reforms to education, health and human rights that Chavez has implemented.
Look, I've been paying a lot of attention to Chavez over the years, and I know everything you're saying is true. But Chavez has introduced a few laws recently that frankly scare the hell out of me - years in prison for criticizing the government?
All that said, in the context of the post, I really meant to identify leaders that capitalists would see as despots, i.e. Fidel and Chavez, without using the obvious psychopaths like Mao and Stalin.
PS - why choose the name Robespierre? Wouldn't have been my first choice, but maybe that explains your fondness for Chavez?
(Kidding. I'd use a smiley if I didn't hate them.)
You are certainly right that Chavez's recent actions bear monitoring. In addition to political arrests you mention, his packing of the Supreme Court and interference with the independence of the judiciary are not the acts of a champion of human rights. However, I still think he falls short of being a despot.
As to the similarity between Chavez and Robespierre, I think it's still too early to tell. However, both men were dealing with the problem of implementing republican ideals in a society historically dominated by a wealthy ruling elite. Whether Chavez will implement a "terror" remains to be seen. Let's hope he doesn't.
Some of Robespierre's personal details fit my own: underpriviledged background, lawyer, leftist. Many others don't. But he was a complex character, with obvious strengths and flaws. That said, I wouldn't want to go out the way he did! (grin)
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