The following is based on a talk by Bob Avakian—part of 7 talks given by Avakian in 2006. In editing this for publication here, as a printed text, some passages have been rewritten and some additional material has been added, but an effort has been made to preserve, as much as possible, the style and flavor of the original presentation (including the responses of the audience at various points), as well as its content and substance (and, with regard to the content, references to particular people and events, which may have been more directly relevant at the time this talk was given, have been retained where they are integral to the meaning and to the “flow” of the presentation, while in certain cases footnotes have been added by the author to amplify the point being made with the specific reference, and/or to relate it to what is happening now).
COMMUNISM AND
JEFFERSONIAN DEMOCRACY
Copyright © 2008 Bob Avakian
To begin—and to immediately touch on the basic reality of how this country is ruled and what its democracy actually amounts to—I want to recount a story I have told several times, because, in a simple and straightforward way, it concentrates so much of importance. Back in 1979, I went on a speaking tour in many of the major cities in the U.S., and in connection with that I made a number of media appearances. At one point I did a taped TV program, on which I was interviewed by several Black journalists in Cleveland. Right after the taping of this program, during which I had laid out clearly my revolutionary viewpoint, the woman who was moderating the program turned to me and said, very matter-of-factly: “My, you’re awfully brave.” Well, this sort of took me aback, so I asked her: “Why do you say that?” And she replied, in the same matter-of-fact tone: “You know, they kill people for saying what you’re saying.”
As I have pointed out a number of times in telling this story, what is very significant about this exchange, and her comments in particular, is that she didn’t even say: “You know, they kill people for trying to do what you’re talking about.” She said simply: they kill people for saying what you’re saying. In this, she was cutting right to the quick, and in fact getting right to the essence of “American democracy.”
And this was not just an odd comment from this particular Black journalist. It is not at all uncommon to hear comments of this kind from Black people and others who have had experience with the brutality and murder commonly carried out by the police, especially in the inner cities across America—or people who, in any case, have some sense of the actual history of this country and in particular the way it has dealt with those who are regarded, by the powers-that-be, as a significant threat, of one kind or another, to their rule. Among many such people there is, if not a profound scientific understanding, nevertheless a basic sense of the real nature of how things are run in this country—of the real relationship between the people who actually rule this society (however people think of that) and the people over whom they rule in running the society (however people understand that).
This is the reason I feel it is important to recount this story frequently—not only because that journalist’s comment hit me very sharply at the time and struck me as very incisive, but because it does capture in a very concentrated way some essential things which far too many people, including many formally educated people, are actually ignorant of—or choose to ignore.
Another anecdote from “everyday life” also brings out this same basic point rather sharply, and unexpectedly. Recently, there was a story on ESPN/The Magazine online, by Scoop Jackson, a Black writer whose material has also appeared in publications such as Slam magazine. This article for ESPN/The Magazine was about Etan Thomas, a professional basketball player on the Washington Wizards (they can’t be called the Washington Bullets anymore—can’t have bullets in Washington other than those directed by the government). [Laughter] Etan Thomas is what they call a “role player” for the Wizards—he comes off the bench, scores a few points a game—he has talent but he’s not a prominent player. And he is someone who, unfortunately, is kind of a rarity these days in professional sports in the U.S.: a progressive guy who is outspoken with his views. He has spoken at some of the anti-war rallies; he’s written poetry condemning the Bush administration and politicians in general and speaking to the glaring contradiction between the way that they talk about things in society and the way things actually are. He has spoken about wanting to drag these politicians down to the inner cities and force them to see what really goes on there, what people there are put through. So, this article by Scoop Jackson is mainly about Etan Thomas’s politics, but in the middle of this article Jackson comments that if Thomas averaged 30 points a game, he might be dead.
Now, to be clear, Jackson doesn’t mean that it’s dangerous to score 30 points a game, in the sense that the effort, the exertion involved in this, might kill him. No, the clear implication is that if Etan Thomas were a prominent player on the level of a Michael Jordan, capturing that kind of media attention and the imagination of masses of people—and if, from that position, he were saying the things he’s saying—he would probably be assassinated by the powers--that-be. Thomas is not calling for revolution, but he is indicting certain outrages of the system—and if he were doing that as a really prominent player, they might very well kill him, because it’s too dangerous to have someone with that level of prominence saying even the kinds of things that Thomas is saying.
These “slices of life” do capture something very essential, and provide a kind of backdrop for a fuller discussion of the much-vaunted “American freedom and democracy,” of the system that rules and shapes this society, and of the need for a radically different society and world.
As the title suggests, much of this discussion will unfold in relation to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and the ideal of “Jeffersonian democracy,” and the contrast between that and the viewpoint and program of communism—which represents, in reality, a far more liberating vision of human freedom.
Jefferson, and his political philosophy, stand in a real sense as an emblem of what is in fact bourgeois democracy—and in reality bourgeois dictatorship—in the history of the United States of America. And, as Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore point out, while “America’s historical memory” of Jefferson “has been rooted in distinct features of his protean career,” for many people Jefferson “remains the spokesman of a radical and popular democracy never achieved in America.”1 In other words, many people—and many progressive people, in particular—who acknowledge that historically there have been, and today there still remain, what they regard as serious “flaws” in the way democracy is actually practiced in the U.S., nevertheless cling to the notion that somehow if this system could actually be made to live up to its ideals, then it would indeed be the best of all possible systems, not only in conception but in reality. And many of these people cling to Jefferson as the personification of, as Kramnick and Moore put it, “a radical and popular democracy” which has “never [been] achieved in America,” but which they long to see fulfilled.
To put this in other—more blunt, and scientific—terms, Jefferson stands as a personification and a concentration of many of the illusions of people in the middle strata in particular, and more specifically many in the intelligentsia, who have not ruptured with, and in fact stubbornly cleave to, a bourgeois-democratic view of the world. And not only is this the case broadly in society, but it has even been true, believe it or not, in the history of the communist movement in this country. We have the phenomenon—which is both astounding and disgraceful, if you’re coming at things from a genuinely communist perspective—of the old Communist Party, USA upholding Jefferson as a model. Even at the height of 1960s radicalism, if you went around the country looking for the CP, where could you find them? In their Jefferson Bookstores! This is a glaring example of how people who claim to be opposed to capitalism and the imperialism of the U.S.—and even some who claim to be communists—have wrapped themselves in the mantle of bourgeois democracy, particularly as that is personified by Thomas Jefferson. Back in the day, it used to be quite a lot of fun to get into a discussion with CP people about why they had Jefferson Bookstores. Besides the obvious fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder, there was the more general fact that Jefferson is a representative of the system that the CP claimed, at least, to be working to get rid of. And that’s just the point: You cannot get rid of this system if you proceed on the basis of upholding and extolling one of the main representatives of that very system, someone who is indeed emblematic of what that system is all about. And, in reality, you cannot get rid of the egregious outrages that many do recognize are committed by the government of the United States, unless you get rid of the whole system of which these egregious outrages are a concentrated expression and of which this government—and in particular its executive power and armed forces—are an instrument and enforcer. You cannot change all this while at the same time clinging to the ideas and ideals that characterize this system and dominate this society—ideas and ideals of which Thomas Jefferson is, in fact, a fitting representative.
Let’s get into this further by examining Jefferson’s notion of an agrarian model as the concentration of the good, just and virtuous society.2 This vision of Jefferson’s involved a number of rather sharp ironies, which it is worth exploring.
The first irony: Jefferson extolled the yeoman, that is, the small independent landowning farmer, as the emblem—and the existence of many such farmers as the basis—for the best form of government and of a virtuous society. To cite Kramnick and Moore once again: “For Jefferson the moral possibilities of democracy depended on keeping America an agricultural nation. That is, he did not think that democracy and the morality necessary to sustain democracy could flourish under social conditions that destroyed the economic independence of individuals.” (The Godless Constitution, p. 152) Yet Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the aristocratic large landowning and slaveholding class in the southern United States, in opposition to the interests of small farmers—and, of course, this was also in opposition to the interests of that group of individuals who most glaringly did not have independence economically, or in any other way: the slaves, who did not actually count as individuals in the eyes of the slaveholders.
In reality, Jefferson’s agrarian society turned out to be a society based on slavery and ruled by slaveowners.
One striking example that a number of people have pointed to in this regard is the Louisiana Purchase (the purchase by the United States government of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803). Having suffered significant military setbacks—and dramatically so in the attempt to put down the armed rebellion of slaves in Haiti which had been initiated under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture—Napoleon Bonaparte, ruler of France, reckoned that he couldn’t easily hold on to this territory in the Americas, and so Jefferson, then President of the United States, stepped in to quickly grab up this territory. In this he acted primarily in the interests of the slaveowners and in order to spread the slaveowning system into the new territories acquired through this act—not to develop an agrarian society based on a multitude of small farmers. This is just one example of many that could be cited which clearly illustrate that Jefferson consistently acted in the interests of the slaveowning class—in conflict with the interests not only of the slaves but also of the yeoman in the South, as well as the rising capitalist class centered in the North.
The whole southern way of life depended on slavery—that was its fundamental economic basis. Even small landowners who didn’t own slaves strove to get into a position to own some. And, with regard to Jefferson himself, not only his economic status but also his political fortunes, including his election to the presidency, depended on slavery, and in particular the “three-fifths” provision in the Constitution of the United States—the so-called “three-fifths compromise,” which established that, for the purposes of taxation but also of voting and representation in the government, each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a human being. As many northerners pointed out at the time, coming from various positions and with various motives, this “compromise” essentially allowed the southern states, where slaves were counted as property, to accumulate greater representation in the national government, because of the multiplication of this “human property.” In other words, northerners who owned property—for example, farms or factories—did not get to count each factory or farm as part of a formula for determining how much representation a northern state would have in the national government (in the House of Representatives, in particular), but the slave states got to count three-fifths of all the slaves, at any given time, in terms of this representation. This tilted things toward the southern states, in terms of the national political structure, from the beginning of the country. In fact, this was something that the southern states insisted upon as a condition of their joining with the northern states to form the United States of America, as a country with a single national government. Even those in the North who, on the basis of moral conviction and/or economic interest, were opposed to slavery, ended up capitulating to this demand, because forming this new country was more important to them—was understood by them to be more essential to their interests—than abolishing slavery. Thus, while this “three-fifths” provision in the Constitution was a compromise, this compromise gave a certain disproportionate power to the South, to the class of southern slaveowners; and this enabled them, up until the Civil War nearly 100 years later, to block and counter steps that would have gone in the direction of abolishing slavery.
It is sometimes claimed that Jefferson was actually opposed to slavery and wanted to see an end to it. And you can find statements by Jefferson where he says that slavery is in fact a blight and that it will have negative consequences for some time to come. There have also been misinterpretations of what Jefferson wrote about slavery. To take one important example, there are passages he wrote in drafts of the Declaration of Independence—some of which did not, but some of which did, make it into the final version of that Declaration—where the King of England and the British government were strongly condemned for supposedly imposing the slave trade on the United States. Now, there were, in fact, ways in which Jefferson and the slave-owning class in Virginia generally were opposed to aspects of the international slave trade, even while they themselves were involved in selling slaves to other states and to slaveowners in other territories. In this, the essential motivation of these Virginia slaveowners was that they didn’t want the price of a slave being driven down, since they themselves had become major sellers of slaves within America itself. This is, fundamentally, the reason that they were opposed to the continuation—once they did oppose it—of the international slave trade. They viewed this above all in terms of property, and supply and demand in relation to selling this particular kind of property—human beings. So, here again, Jefferson acted in the interests of the slave-owning class, and his “agrarian society” turned out to be a slaveowning plantation system—not a society of small independent yeomen.
This is of course related to, and in an overall sense part of, the larger contradiction between Jefferson’s lofty sounding statements in the Declaration of Independence about the equality of all men (note: all men) and their “inalienable rights” and, on the other hand, the glaring fact that Jefferson not only owned slaves himself but consistently acted on behalf of the class of slaveowners and the institution of slavery, even while voicing certain moral qualms about slavery and musings about its long-term consequences for the new American republic.
Historian Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, which is cited in David Brion Davis’s book Inhuman Bondage, argues that for Jefferson and other Virginia slaveowners, such as George Washington (“father of our country”) and James Madison (who was the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and who himself became president of the United States), there was a certain kind of unity—a unity of opposites, as we communists would say—between how they viewed whites, and on the other hand, Black Africans, mulattoes, and Indians. Here I am going to quote from Morgan and provide some commentary on what he says, to highlight the essential points.
Morgan points out: “Racism thus absorbed in Virginia the fear and contempt that men in England, whether Whig or Tory, monarchist or republican, felt for the inarticulate lower classes” of their own “race.” What Morgan is getting at is that in Europe, on the part of the “liberals” as well as the “conservatives” (the Whigs and the Tories), there was an open contempt, especially among the upper, ruling classes and their political representatives, for the “ignorant rabble” of the lower classes, while in the United States this did not find exactly the same expression because a lot of this contempt was, to so speak, deflected and directed toward the masses of Black people—who were overwhelmingly enslaved, especially in the South—and toward mulattoes and Indians.
Morgan continues—and this is very significant in terms of the whole development of bourgeois democracy in the U.S.: “Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to equality”—equality for whites, we should underline—“that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty.” And Morgan points out that one of the things that made this possible was the fact that, in Virginia, “There were too few free poor on hand to matter.” In other words, because of racism and viewing Africans, mulattoes, and Indians as lesser beings not really deserving of freedom, white Virginians could, without feeling an acute contradiction, articulate, as Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, lofty principles about the equality and inalienable rights of all people. They were speaking about white people—and more specifically white men—while explicitly excluding these other groups of people—most especially the people of African origin whom they enslaved. The one went together with the other: the inclusion of some and the exclusion of others, the notion of equality among white people (though this too was not a reality) and the subjugation and enslavement of Black people, mulattoes, and Indians. Here is the paradox and the irony, here is a profound contradiction, built into the United States of America from its very beginning: These Virginians, whose ideas have exerted a very great influence on the conception of freedom in this country—and the embodiment of this in founding documents of this country—represented the interests of the slaveowning class among whites, yet they could declare that they were speaking in universal terms about freedom for all people. They could proclaim a republic, in opposition to a monarchy, they could extol the principles of a government consisting of representatives chosen by the people, and the freedoms associated with republicanism—and they could believe in this—even while practicing and defending slavery, as well as other forms of exploitation and oppression.
As Morgan puts it: “by lumping Indians, mulattoes and Negroes in a single pariah class”—that is, by putting them in a category of beings who are not really to be considered human and not to be afforded the rights and freedoms that human beings should have—“Virginians had paved the way for a similar lumping of small and large planters in a single master class.” Here again we see the dialectical (contradictory) unity between the exclusion of one part of society, and the notion of the unity of the others—identified as white people—even with the class divisions among them.
Morgan points to a very profound conclusion: “Racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient of the republican ideology that enabled Virginians”—like Washington and Madison, as well as Jefferson—“to lead the nation.”3
This speaks to a very significant particularity, or peculiarity, of bourgeois society and the principles of bourgeois democracy as they developed from the very beginning of, and have evolved historically in, the United States. As David Brion Davis points out, Morgan argues that racial slavery enabled Virginia’s slaveowning planter class to coopt the poorer whites and thus perpetuate a highly exploitative and unequal society under the banner of republican liberty. As Davis puts it: “Virginia’s slavery and racism became, paradoxically, the social and ideological basis for America’s dedication to freedom and equality.” (Inhuman Bondage, p. 135)
This is very important to understand, not only in terms of the founding of this country, but in terms of its implications and its consequences throughout the history of the country, down to today. The republican ideology and notions of freedom that have characterized the way in which the United States has been conceived and ruled have indeed included, as fundamental elements, racism and the oppression of Black people, and other “people of color”: the exclusion of these groups—overtly and explicitly, or at least in reality and in practice—from the prevailing notion and application of freedom, and their subjugation from the very beginning and in the essential functioning of the country. And there has been a definite tendency for this to contribute in various ways to blunting the overall class conflicts in American society and the class consciousness of the proletarians—among the whites in particular, but also in a different way among Black people and other oppressed nationalities.
All this relates to the first irony I mentioned: Jefferson talked about a yeoman-based agrarian society as the model society, but actually, in opposition to that, he consistently upheld and fought for the interests of the slaveowning class; and the agrarian society that in reality he was an embodiment of, and a spokesman for, was a slave-owning plantation system.
The second irony is that, while Jefferson extolled the yeoman and the notion of a yeoman-based society, he firmly believed that such yeomen had to be led and headed by members of more elite strata, intellectually and economically—of which Jefferson himself was a representative. And here is an irony within this irony, so to speak: With regard to “Jeffersonian democrats”—this applies to bourgeois-democrats more generally, but in particular to those who uphold and extol Jefferson and his ideas and ideals as the model of a great society, even if it has yet to be fully achieved—many of them are among those who are very quick to attack communists, and in particular Lenin and his work What Is To Be Done?, for alleged elitism! How often have we heard them say things like: “Communists like Lenin think that the masses are too stupid to know what’s good for them! They think these masses have to have elite intellectuals ordering them about and telling them what’s good for them, since they’re too stupid to know what they really want and need—that’s what the communist view is, that’s what Lenin was arguing in What Is To Be Done?”
Here, I don’t have time to go into all the ways in which that is a gross distortion of what Lenin was actually arguing in What Is To Be Done?. But the fact is that the essence of what he’s arguing there is the opposite of these accusations: He is insisting on both the ability and the necessity for the masses to understand the basic dynamics of objective reality, and of human society in particular, in order to consciously struggle to transform society, to make revolution with the final aim of bringing a communist world into being. He is emphasizing that this is the only way that such a radical transformation of society can actually come about. And, yes, he is insisting that the masses need a vanguard to lead them in this struggle—a vanguard whose purpose is precisely to enable the masses themselves to make revolution, and not to substitute for them (or attempt to substitute for them) in doing that.
So here’s “the irony within the irony”: Many of these Jeffersonian (bourgeois) democrats never tire of hurling the charge of “elitism” against communism, and against Lenin in particular, and yet their hero and model Thomas Jefferson was himself a firm believer in the idea that the common people needed an economic and intellectual elite to guide them to the virtuous society. This is the logic Jefferson would have followed, if he had actually tried to bring such a society into being—which he did not.
And the third irony: If Jefferson’s yeoman-based society had in fact been realized—and there are many reasons why it could not have been, but if it had been realized—before very long it would have given rise to and been supplanted by polarization and the emergence of elites ruling over the “common people.” If you envision a society consisting of a large number of farmers, each holding a small amount of land and farming independently on that land, well first of all, there are many “natural conditions,” if you will, that will differ among these landholdings—different conditions of the soil, the topography, and other environmental and geological factors—which will favor some over others.
Take Virginia itself, for example. I pointed to this in the “Revolution” talk:4 Why is there a West Virginia? The basic reason is that the territory of this state—which, before the Civil War, was the western part of Virginia—has a very different terrain than most of the rest of Virginia: this western area is very hilly and rocky, it has a lot of coal, but it is not so favorable for small farming or for farming in general (there is some small farming, but it’s not nearly as favorable for farming as some of the other parts of Virginia, and other parts of the South, which have a much richer soil). That is the underlying reason why, at the time of the Civil War, this western part of the state broke away from Virginia and the Confederacy: the economic conditions and interests of people there were, in significant ways, different.
There is also the very important question of how different parcels of land are situated in relation to water, and other factors which confer an advantage (or disadvantage) to those owning the land. These differences, and their effects and consequences in terms of farm output and related factors, would assert themselves, even if you started out with everybody having approximately the same size farm, with many small farmers independently carrying out family farming—with all the patriarchy and male supremacy that goes along with that, let us not forget. You would have had inequalities within these families and family farms, and there would have been the developing polarization and inequalities between the different farmers, even if you just took a region of the country like the South, to say nothing of the fact that you had farmlands opening further to the West, you had farms of a different kind in the northeast of the country at its beginning, plus you had agriculture in other countries and world trade, which would have penetrated into all this and would have reacted upon and influenced the polarization already developing within agrarian-based society in the U.S. And let’s imagine that somehow the government said: “OK, we will implement the ‘Jeffersonian model’: everybody has to be a small farmer—or, if everybody doesn’t have to be a small farmer, at least the base of the whole economy and the whole society has to be small farmers—and if anybody starts getting much bigger than anybody else, in terms of landholdings, we’ll take part of their land away and give it to others, so there will once again be more equal distribution of small farmland throughout the country.” Well, eventually you would have had wars, armed conflicts, over that, because those whom you were hindering in that way (those whose land you were taking away in order to “equalize” things) would have resisted, and if you kept doing this they would have rebelled and taken to arms.
And then, again, there is the whole world market and its influence on all this. At the time of the founding of the U.S., if you look at the sale of the southern cotton and tobacco and other products, such as sugar, where were they going? To a large degree, it was to the world market, to Europe and other places. In order to maintain a situation of more or less equal landholdings, you would have had to stop everybody from producing for the world market, because if they produced for the world market, inequality would have been fostered and reinforced: Some farmers would have done better than others, would have found a more favorable market at any given time for whatever product these farmers were growing. And that would have reacted upon and intensified the polarization that was already developing. It would have been necessary to step in with the government and militarily shut off the country from the world market.
In short, this would have been totally impractical and unrealizable. Even if you started out on that basis—of many farmers with more or less equal size landholdings—you couldn’t maintain it. This is fundamentally because all this would be—and in the actual history of the U.S. everything has been—within the overall context of commodity production and exchange. And there are two things to single out about that here: One, as what I have already sketched out illustrates, commodity production and exchange inevitably lead to inequalities, to polarization. The general operation of the commodity system means that there will be inequality; it means that some fare better in competition than others; it means that polarization develops. And what goes along with that—the second thing to emphasize here—is that labor power itself (the ability to work, in general) will become a commodity. You see this happening even today: Many farmers are no longer able to make it as farmers (or by farming alone); they are compelled to hire themselves out to others who are doing better (to other farmers, or to people running other businesses). In an agrarian society—and in particular one that is operating within an overall framework of capitalist commodity production and exchange—more and more people will be reduced to the position of being wage workers, having to sell their ability to work, their labor power, in order to live. You will also get that polarization—of capitalist and wage worker—along with the great unevenness that will continue to develop even among the class of landowners, broadly speaking. And when you add in the world market, once again, all this becomes much further accentuated.
So, along with the glaring contradiction between Jefferson’s proclamations about how “all men are created equal” and endowed with certain “inalienable rights,” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, not only the fact of his being a slaveowner but his repeated actions, including as president, on behalf of the whole slaveowning class, these other ironies (or contradictions—ironies are contradictions) that I have pinpointed and spoken to here are in turn an expression of the fundamental nature of the society in which Jefferson lived and functioned and of which he does stand as a legitimate champion: a system rooted in relations of exploitation and oppression.5
In sum on this point: In looking at what Jefferson wrote (in his “Notes on Virginia” and elsewhere) about the model of a good and virtuous society being one based on a multitude of yeoman farmers, and the conflict between this and the kind of society he actually upheld and fought for, we can extract from this some profound lessons about the nature of modern republican government as a bourgeois democracy—and about the nature of bourgeois democracy itself in general, as a form of class rule and domination, a dictatorship of the bourgeois class—as well as, more particularly, the specific expressions this has taken in the history of the United States, with the peculiar institution of slavery for more than a hundred years leading into the founding of this country, and for nearly a hundred more years after its founding.
There is a semi-official narrative about the history and the “greatness” of America, which says that this greatness of America lies in the freedom and ingenuity of its people, and above all in a system that gives encouragement and reward to these qualities. Now, in opposition to this semi-official narrative about the greatness of America, the reality is that—to return to one fundamental aspect of all this—slavery has been an indispensable part of the foundation for the “freedom and prosperity” of the USA. The combination of freedom and prosperity is, as we know, still today, and in some ways today more than ever, proclaimed as the unique quality and the special destiny and mission of the United States and its role in the world. And this stands in stark contradiction to the fact that without slavery, none of this—not even the bourgeois-democratic freedoms, let alone the prosperity—would have been possible, not only in the southern United States but in the North as well, in the country as a whole and in its development and emergence as a world economic and military power.
Obviously, the way in which agriculture in the South developed was directly related to, indeed founded on, the system of slavery. But, beyond that, the way in which the U.S. related to the world market, and built up its prosperity and economic base in that way, was to a very large degree dependent on slave-based production. The interchange between the development of manufacture in the North and the development of agriculture in the South, for example—even when, before the Civil War, that interchange went to a large degree through the world market and through England in particular, where for example cotton would be sold to the textile mills in England and other products would be sold from England to the northern manufacturers in the U.S.—even that would not have happened in the way it did, on the kind of scale it did and with the prosperity that it led to, without slavery. Of course, this process—where, for example, cotton from the southern U.S. was to a large degree sold to England, rather than to New England—contributed over time to sharpening the contradiction between the slave system in the South and the developing capitalist system in the North of the U.S. But the point to emphasize here is that, in an overall and fundamental sense, the slave-grown products of the southern U.S. constituted a major factor in the development of the U.S. economy, in the North as well as the South. And the development of that economy, in turn, has been the essential underlying basis for the massive military machinery which is the ultimate enforcer of the role of the U.S. as a major world power.
In short: There would be no United States as we now know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth.
Now, of course, slavery was not the only factor that played a significant part in the emergence of the U.S. as a world power, whose economic strength underlies its massive military force. A major historical factor in all this was the theft of land, on a massive scale, from Mexico as well as from native peoples. But, in turn, much of that conquest of land was, for a long period of time up until the Civil War, largely to expand the slave system. “Remember the Alamo,” we are always reminded. Well, many of the “heroes” of the Alamo were slave traders and slave chasers. Forget all that stuff about the Davy Crocketts as great heroes, which many of us were fed as kids—these were slave chasers and slave enforcers, and adventurers who, to a large degree, were aiming to expand the slave system. More fundamentally, whatever the particular role of individuals, the war with Mexico over Texas was, on the part of the United States, most essentially motivated by the drive to spread the slave system. And expanding the slave system was a major aim of the overall war with Mexico, although that war also led to the westward expansion of the developing capitalist system centered in the northern United States (those two systems, those two modes of production, capitalism and slavery, were in competition with each other over which would dominate in the new territory conquered by the United States; this was part of the mounting conflict between them, which then erupted into the Civil War in the 1860s).
Now, if some things had turned out differently, a different United States, or something entirely different altogether, might have evolved in the same territory that now exists as the United States of America (or roughly the same territory), but the United States that did evolve could not have evolved, and would not have reached the position it has, if it were not for the existence and role of slavery in all this. So whenever you hear talk about “freedom” in this country, keep that in mind. Think back to the meaning of the statements by Edmund Morgan which were discussed earlier. Even when we’re talking about actual bourgeois-democratic rights—and let us be clear that this is what we’re talking about, rights within the overall framework of political domination, dictatorship, by the capitalist (bourgeois) class which in fact rules this country—you always have to understand this in dialectical relation with slavery, in the very foundation and in terms of the historical development of the country.
With regard to bourgeois-democratic rights, as well as in the overall development of this country, slavery is a decisive factor which continues to cast its long shadow.
This is a fundamental point that those who want to base themselves on idealist notions of Jeffersonian democracy need to be confronted with, and over which they need to be engaged and struggled with—in a very lofty way, but also a very sharp way. There are big things at stake in terms of how people understand this. This is not “abstract” history. Especially in this country, with its instant gratification ethos, people are conditioned and encouraged to think only in very limited and narrow terms—to only slightly vulgarize it: anything that happened last week, let alone last year, to say nothing of a couple of centuries ago, is totally irrelevant to whatever I’m going to consume right now. In opposition to this conditioning that is carried out by the ruling class and its media and other means of molding public opinion, and is promoted by the very way this system functions, actually understanding history—and waging struggle about how to scientifically approach the understanding of history—is a crucial part of the struggle over the direction of society, and in a very real sense the direction of the world as a whole, especially given the role that the U.S., and its imperialist domination, now plays in the world. Really grasping what are the most fundamental things about the nature of this country and the way it has historically evolved: this has a crucial bearing on the struggle to radically transform this society, and ultimately the world as a whole. It has a crucial bearing on the struggle to win more and more people to understand the need to carry out such a radical transformation—and, as part of that, to grasp the impossibility of building a just and virtuous society (whatever that means) on the basis of Jeffersonian principles, even if such principles could be really and fully realized.
Not only did slavery play a major role in the historical development of the U.S., but the wealth and power of the U.S. rests today on a worldwide system of imperialist exploitation that ensnares hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, of people in conditions hardly better than those of slaves.6 Now, if this seems like an extreme or extravagant claim, think about the tens of millions of children throughout the Third World who, from a very, very early age, are working nearly every day of the year—as the slaves on the southern plantations in the United States used to say, “from can’t see in the morning, till can’t see at night”—until they’ve been physically used up, with their lives literally passing, bit by bit, day after day, from them into the machinery on which they’re working (or which, in a real sense, is working on them, wearing their lives away) and into the products which they are producing through this labor. These are conditions very similar to outright slavery, and they often go along with superstructural expressions which are very close to slavery—ways in which, through customs and traditions, and sometimes even formal codes, the lives of these children, and others in these conditions, are controlled, confined and degraded. This includes overt sexual harassment of women, and many other degradations as well.
All this is the foundation on which the imperialist system rests, with U.S. imperialism now sitting atop it all.
Today, in the large parts of Africa which were raided for slaves who were traded on the international market for centuries, the continuing effects of this—and the overall plunder and depredations carried out by colonialism and imperialism up to the present time in Africa—continue to be felt in that continent. Throughout the Third World, huge numbers of people are maintained in conditions of horrible suffering as a result of the workings of this same imperialist system; even those who are not directly exploited by capital are—through the overall operation of the capitalist-imperialist system, not only economically but also politically and militarily as well as culturally and ideologically—regarded and treated as just so much human waste. Recently, I read an article about Angola (where there was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a revolution several decades ago now): Today the big oil companies, headquartered in the major imperialist countries, are plundering the oil of Angola, while even in the mainstream, bourgeois press there are articles describing, or attempting to describe, almost indescribable conditions of suffering endured by the masses of people who, out of desperation, have flooded into the cities—children playing by sliding down piles of garbage and human waste, surrounded by rivulets containing the same garbage and waste. Imagine the impact on the health of these children and on the people generally.
This is the foundation on which rests the prosperity and “freedom” of the U.S. today—and it is the foundation of the “free world” about which the rulers of the U.S. and their media endlessly prate. At the same time, for tens of millions within the U.S. itself, conditions of brutal exploitation and oppression continue, including in a very acute way for immigrants—millions of them from Latin America and other parts of the Third World which are plundered by imperialism—along with many others in what Lenin referred to as the lower and deeper sections of the proletariat. There are also millions in the inner cities (and others in rural areas across the country) who have been cast aside, denied the “right” to be exploited in a regular “legitimate” job. Inner city youth in particular are constantly subject to harassment, brutality and even murder at the hands of the police and are imprisoned in huge numbers (one in nine young Black men is currently in prison!).
All this takes us back again to Marx’s comment on the “rosy dawn” of capitalist accumulation several centuries ago—an initial accumulation based on slavery and the hunting of slaves, on the burying alive of huge numbers of the native population in the mines of Bolivia, on the intensive exploitation of child labor. Today, this continues and exists in an international dimension, on an even bigger scale than it did at the time of that “rosy dawn” of capitalism. Now, in this era of capitalist imperialism, the world and the world’s people are even more tightly bound together and enmeshed in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, with all of its ruthlessness—which does not derive from the particular greediness of this or that individual capitalist or group of capitalists, but from the very process and “laws” of capitalist accumulation itself. This is something that is extremely important to grasp, and to struggle for people generally to understand: All this is poured into the very foundation and feeds the ongoing functioning of this whole system.
If you listen to the capitalists themselves, with their explanations and rationalizations for why they function as they do, you will hear them articulating some (though of course only some) of the truth about this. Even large aggregates of capital, controlling billions of dollars, are involved in intense rivalry with others doing the same. And the cheapening of the cost of production—especially through the more intensive and extensive exploitation of human labor—is absolutely necessary for that. Yes, capitalists would tend in any case to seek the most profitable conditions of production. But they are driven to do so by intense competition—which takes place on a gigantic scale in today’s imperialist world—between very large aggregations of capital. Even some of these gigantic aggregations of capital lose out and go under if they do not more ruthlessly and relentlessly exploit people in the kinds of conditions that I’ve been speaking of. And—it cannot be said too many times, especially in the face of the systematic attempts to hide this and cover it up—this is the foundation and these are the dynamics of the “prosperity and the freedom” that is so loudly proclaimed as the special nature of American society and of the “American character,” with its much advertised ingenuity and inventiveness and restless pursuit of something new—and, above all, more profit and money.
To return to Jefferson and his influence on “the American character”—or, more precisely, the particular bourgeois notions of freedom and rights that have prevailed in America—while Jefferson did speak at times of an agrarian-based society as the model of a good and virtuous society—and I have examined the essential content of this as well as some of the essential contradictions bound up with it—this does not mean that Jefferson believed that the good society should be based on or involve only agriculture. Jefferson’s view not only encompassed the need for other components, besides agriculture, of an overall economy but he also argued that private ownership in all these spheres was essential for the good society. Such private ownership was bound up with his notions of freedom. As Kramnick and Moore point out, Jefferson wrote that “agriculture, manufacture, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left free to individual enterprise.” (The Godless Constitution, p. 107)
Furthermore, for Jefferson—and this was true as well for James Madison, the principal author of the U.S. Constitution—rights such as freedom of speech and the basic philosophical concept of freedom of conscience were bound up with the notion of the inviolability of private property. Kramnick and Moore point to something which I also noted in a short pamphlet, “U.S. Constitution: An Exploiters’ Vision of Freedom”: Madison regarded the protection of property as one of the most essential functions of the state—and it is important to underline here again that for Madison, and in the U.S. for nearly a hundred years, one of the most important forms of that property was human beings, slaves. Madison, of course, was himself a slaveowner and a defender of the slave system; at the same time, he was also a more general, or “universal,” advocate of the rights of private property. Kramnick and Moore go on to make the point that, for Madison as well as Jefferson, “opinions and conscience were also sacred forms of individual property.” (The Godless Constitution, p. 103)
This is an extremely important point, and we should pause and examine this briefly. This of course is bound up with the whole idea that is encapsulated in the phrase we hear so often: “the free market place of ideas.” This has the virtue, if you will, of being rather explicit in its terms—it is a clear indication that this notion of individual conscience and of the expression of ideas is bound up with concepts of market principles, private ownership of commodities and ultimately capitalism and its particular categories of commodity exchange.7
We see this standing out very directly and starkly today in all the battles, not only in the U.S. (or other particular countries) but on an international scale, over “intellectual property.” And, of course, this is not merely a matter of legal abstraction but something which dramatically impacts the lives of great numbers of people. This happens, for example, when large agro-business firms based in the U.S. (or some other imperialist country) develop a genetically-engineered basis for producing a certain crop, and then they work to impose that means of agriculture on farmers not only in the U.S. itself but in other countries as well, disrupting and supplanting the more traditional ways of producing food, and in fact making it impossible for these farmers to continue agriculture in the traditional way, forcing them instead to pay the agro-business firm which owns these “intellectual property rights,” in order to again produce the genetically-engineered agricultural product—to, in effect, rent the ability to carry out such reproduction, as this has now become the “intellectual property” of a gigantic corporation based in a country like the U.S. Millions of people’s lives, and food production on a large scale, have been disrupted and even ruined through this process. From this and other examples we can see that it is not just a matter of an abstract theoretical concept of opinions and conscience being sacred forms of individual property. This has tremendous and devastating consequences for masses of people, millions and even hundreds of millions of people—and, at least indirectly, billions of people—throughout the world.
But let’s speak to the philosophical concept of “the free market place of ideas” and how that contrasts with the communist view of the pursuit of the truth and the contention of opposing ideas as an essential part of the pursuit of the truth. Here we come around to John Stuart Mill and his concept of liberty and in particular freedom of expression and the exchange of ideas.8 In a certain way we could say to this: Mill—yes, and no. From our point of view, the communist point of view, it is crucial to actually understand reality, in its motion and development, in order to be able to transform it increasingly in the interests of the broad masses of people and ultimately of humanity as a whole. Further, there is a need for the contestation of different ideas, and different approaches to understanding reality, in order to get most deeply to a correct understanding of that reality. And, yes, there is the very important principle that people should feel free and encouraged to express their ideas and not feel a heavy breath breathing down on them if their ideas are non-conformist or unconventional, or go up against the status quo, whatever that status quo might be. That is actually an important principle that we should understand deeply and uphold and fight for. At the same time, however, from the communist point of view, this is all part of a process of not just a few individuals but of masses of people getting to the truth of things, in many different particular spheres and in a larger sense, and being able to act in accordance with an actual, scientific understanding of reality—of reality as it really is, so to speak (and as it is moving and changing). But the notion of opinions and conscience as individual or private property ultimately—and often not so ultimately—gets in the way of, and poses a significant obstacle to, that process of pursuing the truth.
Understanding the importance of the “battle of ideas,” of not suppressing unpopular or unconventional thinking, in order to have the richest process in seeking an understanding of reality, and in order for the people in society to feel that they have air to breathe and room to be “different” and to express different ideas: this is a crucial dimension of the kind of society that we want to live in and that masses of people would really thrive in; and it is also crucial in order to arrive at the truth in fundamental terms. But there is a vast difference, a crucial distinction, between that and the notion that any individual’s ideas are her/his private property and should in effect operate in competition with other people and their ideas—that all this should contest in a “market place of ideas” to see which one can, to put it rather baldly, command the highest exchange value. This is not the same as determining which one actually contributes the most to getting to the truth, and is not simply an appreciation of the way in which the contestation of ideas will help to create the right atmosphere for the kind of society we want, but it gives expression to the notion of ideas as commodities, competing to command a greater remuneration, in one way or another (even if this is not always directly monetary). So, too, the notions and the practice of “intellectual property rights” are an extension of, or are bound up with, the idea of “the free market place of ideas.”
All this flows from the philosophical concept of opinions and conscience as private property. And when you have individuals holding ideas as private property, the greater social good is going to be interfered with and hindered, just as it is generally in the production and exchange of commodities. People will hold back their ideas if they think it will benefit them to not bring them forward at a given time. Everybody who is familiar, for example, with copyrighting (and patents) knows the ways in which people who come forward with inventive ideas will jealously guard them, lest somebody else steal them—or, on the other hand, will rush to institutionalize them as protected private property, before someone else does the same. And there are many stories of how individuals have brought forward creative ideas, only to have them grabbed up by more powerful forces, such as corporations, which end up with the “rights” to them. All this is an expression of a situation where people are in competition with each other—and ultimately an expression of a society which tends toward turning everything, including ideas, into commodities and into capital.
Even where this doesn’t take a crude monetary expression, philosophically the concept of this being my idea—as opposed to an idea which is important in a larger context and ultimately for humanity—can cause real harm, and in this kind of atmosphere, in this overall framework of capitalist commodity relations, there can be, and often is, real conflict between the individual’s profiting from his/her ideas and society and humanity as a whole benefitting from these ideas.
This outlook and approach of ideas as personal possessions, or private property—as commodities—has negative influences and consequences not only in terms of how people treat ideas that they come up with, but also how they view mixing it up with other people in the realm of working with, and wrangling over, ideas. Again, even leaving aside direct or more crude monetary considerations, to put it in somewhat psychological terms, your ego gets involved in it. Is what’s important what is actually true and whether your ideas contribute to people understanding things, and being able to act on that basis in the fundamental interests of humanity—or is what’s important the fact, or the notion, that something is your idea? There’s hardly anyone, if there is anyone, who has not experienced these kinds of narrow and more self-centered sentiments or pulls—and, yes, sad to say, but not surprisingly, this is so even among the ranks of the communists. But, again, all this does a great deal of actual harm, and works against the larger interests of society and humanity.
So, returning to John Stuart Mill, there is a great difference between the positive side of John Stuart Mill, as represented in his arguments that ideas should not be suppressed because they are unpopular—that it is very important that people hear ideas articulated not merely by those who oppose them, however fairly they may strive to characterize them, but by those who are ardent advocates of those ideas—there is a profound difference between that principle, which has important application and is something that must be a part of the overall process of revolution, radically transforming society and advancing to a communist world, and on the other hand the notion of the “free market place of ideas.” The contention over ideas, and the overall development of ideas, should be unfettered by notions and by realities of markets, of competition and commodity relations, of capital. As I have pointed out before,9 we do need to talk about the limitations, problems and errors in the cultural works that were produced during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China; but, besides the very high artistic quality and the revolutionary content of many of those works, one of the truly great things about the creation of these works was that it was explicitly—and very enthusiastically on the part at least many of the people involved—a process that consciously strove to overcome notions of individual ownership of ideas, including artistic creation. It is not that individuals and their creativity were unimportant and made no contribution in the creation of these works, but they were so and did so as part of a larger process, and not in accordance with—in fact in direct opposition to—the notion of ideas as private property.
Now, to be clear, there are a lot of ways in which, in order to have the best atmosphere and circumstances for creativity to flower and be expressed—and in order to have the kind of society in which people can increasingly thrive, individually as well as in their mutual interaction—you do have to not only recognize in a general sense but give the necessary scope to individual initiative and creativity. There does have to be a significant dimension in which people can go off and “do their own thing.” I asked a poet and spoken word artist, in the course of a conversation with him: “Could you write your poetry if you had a party cadre standing over your shoulder examining it at every point?” And he answered emphatically: “No fucking way!” Well, there is a definite reality to that, and the kind of society and world we want is not one in which there would be that kind of misplaced “political supervision” (“let’s check to make sure that everything is in accord with the ‘party line’ or what leadership thinks at every given point”...NO!). There should be room, there must be room, expansive space for a lot of creativity, and certainly for unconventional and non-conformist creativity, including that which goes up against whatever are the prevailing ideas and “norms” in a socialist society at any given time. But that can be developed on a much broader scale and in a much richer way the more it is increasingly unfettered from the “free market place of ideas,” the exchange of commodities in the realm of ideas, and the notion, ultimately, of opinions and conscience being sacred forms of individual private property.
Without lapsing into post-modernist theories of literature, and so on—in which basically the text has no intrinsic meaning and instead it means whatever anybody reads into it, and so there are multitudes of meaning, all equally legitimate—it is a fact that with regard to works of art, except for those that are literally created by the artist only for himself or herself (which are decidedly a small minority of such works), most of them are meant to go out to the world to make some kind of statement or other—however the artist understands that. In general, works of art are meant to interact with people and to affect people in various ways. And that can be done much more fully and richly while on the one hand, yes, giving a lot of scope to individual initiative and creativity, but at the same time breaking all this loose from notions and practices that embody the “free market place of ideas,” commodity production and exchange, and the competition that goes along with that—and the thinking that’s bound up with that.
So, yes, there must be in socialist society—and in communist society—a recognition of the importance of individual conscience, and of the right, and fundamentally of the need, for people to create various works of literature and art which embody and give life to different particular ways of “coming at” reality (or a part of reality), different modes of “individual expression.” There is an important role for that, and there must be a broad scope for that—both as something that’s important in itself and also, in a deeper sense, as part of the overall process of coming to understand the world in increasingly richer ways and continuing to transform it in accordance with the largest interests of humanity. All this is part of the objective of advancing to—and then continuing to advance in—the radically new era of communism. But this is very different from—and will be much more fully expressed the more that it moves beyond— notions of individual conscience and individual creativity as private property—which inevitably means in conflict and competition with other embodiments of private property.
Just as, in an overall and fundamental sense, the advance to communism means, and must mean, moving beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right—beyond the sphere of commodity production and exchange and everything bound up with that, including in the realm of ideas—it must mean moving beyond bourgeois right in relation to individuality, individual conscience, individual ideas, and individual creativity. This does not mean suffocating or arbitrarily restricting this, but on the contrary giving much greater expression to it, while approaching all this on a radically new and qualitatively different basis, breaking free and far beyond the historically limited and, in comparison with what has now become possible, the paltry principles of “the free market place of ideas” and the notion—which Madison and Jefferson upheld—of opinions and conscience as sacred forms of individual property.
The concept of “competing elites” is an important element of theories of bourgeois democracy and how it is the best system possible. The basic argument is that the existence of competing elites is crucial in order for people—and, in particular, those who are not part of the “elites”—to exercise initiative by being able to choose among, and thereby being able to influence, these competing elites. For example, Robert A. Dahl, in his book Democracy and Its Critics, speaks to what he calls an “MDP”—standing for Modern Dynamic Pluralist—society and how this best serves what he characterizes with the term “Polyarchy”—which, according to Dahl, involves “a set of political institutions that, taken together, distinguish modern representative democracy from all other political systems, whether non-democratic regimes or earlier democratic systems.” (Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, Yale University Press, 1989, p. 218.)
Dahl argues that:
polyarchy provides a broad array of human rights and liberties that no actually existing real world alternative to it can match. Integral to polyarchy itself is a generous zone of freedom and control that cannot be deeply or persistently invaded without destroying polyarchy itself....Although the institutions of polyarchy do not guarantee the ease and vigor of citizen participation that could exist, in principle, in a small city-state, nor ensure that governments are closely controlled by the citizens or that policies invariably correspond with the desires of a majority of citizens, they make it unlikely in the extreme that a government will long pursue policies that deeply offend a majority of citizens. What is more, those institutions even make it rather uncommon for a government to enforce policies to which a substantial number of citizens object and try to overturn by vigorously using the rights and opportunities available to them. If citizen control over collective decisions is more anemic than the robust control they would exercise if the dream of participatory democracy were ever realized, the capacity of citizens to exercise a veto over the reelection and policies of elected officials is a powerful and frequently exercised means for preventing officials from imposing policies objectionable to many citizens. (Democracy and Its Critics, p. 223)
Well, let’s look at things in the actually existing real world. [Laughter] Let’s take what Dahl has said here, which expresses a fairly common affirmation of what is in reality bourgeois democracy, and see how this measures up to—and what it actually amounts to in—this real world. Let’s begin with the assertion, which Dahl makes emphatically, that in such a society it is “unlikely in the extreme that a government will long pursue policies that deeply offend a majority of citizens” and that “What is more, those institutions even make it rather uncommon for a government to enforce policies to which a substantial number of citizens object and try to overturn by vigorously using the rights and opportunities available to them.”
In regard to this, I cannot help paraphrasing Lenin here, to say that Dahl might wish that there were a law against laughing in public (and for all we know, the Bush regime may yet oblige such a wish). Otherwise, to make reference to significant current events, and specifically to the millions and tens of millions who have tried by “vigorously using the rights and opportunities available to them” to prevent and then bring to an end the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and numerous other policies of the Bush regime which are not only opposed but deeply detested by a very substantial segment of the population in the U.S.—probably a majority—if Dahl’s statement were repeated among such people, it would very likely be drowned out under a tidal wave of bitter laughter.
It is not just experience in this immediate period, but experience throughout the history of this country that has illustrated time and again the following essential truths:
1) There is, in the U.S., a ruling class that has interests which are very different from and fundamentally in opposition to those of the masses of citizens.
2) This ruling class in reality exercises a dictatorship—that is, a monopoly of political power backed up by and concentrated in a monopoly of armed power over the rest of society—and those who at any given time are administering that dictatorship will continue to pursue policies they are determined to carry out, even in the face of massive popular opposition, unless and until the larger interests of the ruling class dictate that it modify or even abandon a particular policy—or until that ruling class is overthrown.
3) Elections do not provide an avenue for the realization of the desire of masses of people to see these policies and actions of the government change—although mass political resistance can, under certain circumstances, make an important contribution to forcing changes in government policy, especially if this takes place in a larger context where these policies are running into real trouble and, among other things, are leading to heightened divisions within the ruling class itself.
If we step back a few decades from the present, we can see how the experience around Vietnam provided a concentrated example of all this. As I have pointed out before, there were two elections in relation to Vietnam which involved significant contention and “soul searching” particularly among people strongly opposed to the Vietnam war, and which illustrate the basic point I am making—and debunk the notions that Dahl is putting forward.
First, there was the election in 1964 when the U.S. began to significantly escalate its “involvement” in Vietnam. To inject a personal element into this—but something which touches on a more general phenomenon—this is one of the two elections for president of the United States in which I actually voted. It was the first election in which I was eligible to vote, and after some agonizing I decided to vote for Lyndon Johnson in that 1964 election (I voted for Eldridge Cleaver in 1968, but that was a very different story). At the time of that 1964 election, there was a very intense debate in the “movement” about whether or not to vote—that is, whether or not to vote for Johnson. Johnson was coming out on behalf of civil rights, making concessions to the massive struggle around that, and at the same time, even while as president he was carrying out an escalation of the Vietnam war, he was not openly talking in the crazy and extreme terms that his rival, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, was. Goldwater was famous—or some would say infamous—for his statement, at the time of his nomination at the Republican Convention in 1964, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Of course, Goldwater conceived of liberty and justice in bourgeois and imperialist terms, and he saw the Vietnamese people’s resistance to U.S. domination as a vice—a violation of and interference with imperialist liberty and justice. So Goldwater was talking in extreme terms about Vietnam—bombing the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age, or language similar to that. Many people in the broad movement of that time were arguing that, with all this in mind, you had to vote for Johnson—that it was absolutely essential, in terms of Vietnam as well as other key issues, to vote for Johnson—and I, along with many others, was influenced and finally persuaded by this. So we went and held our noses, as people often do these days, and voted for the Democrat, Lyndon Johnson.
Well, after the election was over—during which Johnson had run campaign ads talking about the extreme danger of what Goldwater would do in Vietnam—Johnson himself proceeded to massively escalate the war in Vietnam, both in terms of bombing that country and in terms of beginning the process of sending wave after wave of U.S. troops to Vietnam (which, by the late 1960s, reached the level of 500,000). And, of course, those of us who had been persuaded and cajoled into voting for Johnson felt bitterly betrayed by this. This provided a very profound lesson.
By the time the 1972 elections came around (and I spoke to this somewhat in my memoir),10 once again there was, even within the Revolutionary Union (the forerunner of our Party) as well as more broadly among those opposed to the Vietnam war, a big debate and struggle about whether it was necessary to support the “anti-war candidate,” George McGovern—or, to put it another way, to vote against Nixon. Within the RU itself, arguments were made that it was “our internationalist duty to the Vietnamese people” to vote for McGovern and get Nixon out, because otherwise Nixon would escalate the war in Vietnam again, but McGovern would bring an end to the war.
Well, in the end, I (and the leadership of the RU overall) didn’t go for this. We did examine the question seriously—we didn’t just take a dogmatic approach. I remember being up many nights wrestling with the question: Is this a particular set of circumstances which requires an exception to the general approach of not supporting, not even holding your nose and voting for, bourgeois electoral candidates? But I came to the conclusion—on the basis of a lot of agonizing and of wrangling with others—that, no, it was not “our internationalist duty to the Vietnamese people” to support McGovern, that instead our internationalist duty was better served by continuing to build mass resistance against that war and the overall policies of the government—and, more fundamentally, opposition to the system as a whole—which is what we set out to do.
But there were many who did get drawn into the whole McGovern thing. It might be very interesting for those of you who weren’t around at the time (or were not yet politically conscious and active) to go back and look at films, if they are available, of the 1972 Democratic Convention. There was Jerry Rubin, and many other “movement people,” who were being welcomed into the killing embrace of “mainstream” bourgeois politics, and specifically the Democratic Party—back within those suffocating confines. And, in truth, some of them were feeling a certain sense of relief in believing that, after years of struggling to change things from outside those confines—with all the difficulties, sacrifices, and, yes, real dangers, bound up with that—maybe there could be an avenue for changing things “from within.” But, of course, what happened in reality is that Nixon trounced McGovern in the elections. Through the machinery of bourgeois electoral politics, and the dynamics of bourgeois politics in a more general sense, things were more or less set up that way. Without going into too many particulars here, it is worth noting that McGovern was barely out of the gate campaigning, after the Democratic Convention, when his running mate (vice presidential nominee) Thomas Eagleton was exposed as having been a “mental case,” as it was popularly conceived at the time. Eagleton, it turned out, had at one point sought psychiatric help, and this made him “unfit” to be vice president and next in line as head of state. So they had to replace him with Sargent Shriver (of the Kennedy clan). And more generally, the whole McGovern campaign was a debacle, right from the beginning. Nixon ended up winning almost every state in the presidential election that year.
Many people were demoralized by this—essentially because they had accepted, and confined themselves within, the terms of bourgeois electoral politics. Yet a few months after the 1972 election, Nixon was forced to sign a “peace agreement” on Vietnam. While this took place in the context of larger international factors—including the contention between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (which was then a social-imperialist country: socialist in name but imperialist in fact and in deed), as well as the international role at that time of China, which was then a socialist country but was adopting certain tactical measures, including an “opening to the west,” as part of dealing with the very real threat of attack by the Soviet Union on China—it was, to a significant degree, because of the continuing struggle of the Vietnamese people, and massive opposition within the U.S. itself to U.S. aggression in Vietnam, that Nixon was forced to sign this “peace agreement.”
This agreement led, first, to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam—and an attempt by Nixon to carry out “Vietnamization” (getting the army of the U.S.-dependent South Vietnamese government to more fully fight the war, backed up by U.S. air power)—and then led, only a couple of years later, to the ultimate and very welcomed defeat of U.S. imperialism and its puppet government in South Vietnam. You all have seen the scenes of people scrambling to get on the helicopters leaving the U.S. embassy in 1975, as the National Liberation Front troops (the so-called “Vietcong”) knock down the gate to that embassy.
Now, the important lesson for what we’re talking about here is that in neither case—neither in 1964 nor in 1972—were the decisive changes that occurred brought about by the elections. Quite the contrary. In 1964 people massively voted for someone who supposedly wouldn’t escalate the Vietnam war—and then he escalated that war on a massive scale. In 1972 many people voted against Nixon because he was going to escalate the war further—but he was forced to pull out U.S. troops, and that led to the ultimate defeat of the U.S. and its puppet government in South Vietnam.
In both cases, the compelling pull and the seeming logic that it was crucial to vote for a Democrat—or at least to vote against the Republican—in order to avert real disasters, was not borne out at all in reality. And the reason for that is very basic: Elections are not the actual dynamics through which essential decisions about the policies of the government, and the direction of society, are made—the votes of the people in elections are not the actual forces compelling changes of one kind or another. This is what is dramatically illustrated if you examine—and in particular, if you examine scientifically—these two elections, which in effect bracketed the heavy involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam (the 1964 election toward the beginning, and the 1972 election toward the end, of that involvement).
So, let’s issue a challenge: Let anyone explain how holding your nose and voting for the Democrat (or enthusiastically voting for the Democrat) in either or both of those elections led to, and was responsible for, changes of the one kind or the other—negative changes in 1964, with the escalation by the U.S. of the war in Vietnam, and 8 years later the positive change of U.S. imperialism heading for decisive defeat in its attempt to impose its domination on Vietnam through massive devastation of that country and the slaughter of several million of its people. No, none of this happened through elections, because elections are not the actual basis and the real vehicle through which truly significant changes in society (and the world), of one kind or another, are brought about.
This is obviously extremely relevant now, when there is a widespread hatred, in certain ways unprecedented in its scale and in some senses in its depth, for the whole regime associated with George W. Bush, and yet people have great difficulty rupturing with the notion that the only possible avenue for changing the course of things is to get sucked once again into the dynamics of bourgeois politics—which are set up to serve, and can only serve, the interests of the ruling class, and which have not and do not provide the means and channels through which changes in the interests of the people can be brought about.
In light of all this, we can see the fundamental error reflected in Dahl’s assertion that “the capacity of citizens to exercise a veto over the reelection and policies of elected officials is a powerful and frequently exercised means for preventing officials from imposing policies objectionable to many citizens.” In fact, the means through which that happens is massive upsurge and resistance, in combination with other factors—including resistance, struggle and revolution in other parts of the world, as well as other contradictions that the imperialists are running up against, even short of revolution to overthrow them. That is the basis on which, and the means through which, officials are prevented from continuing to impose policies objectionable to large numbers of people.
And here we get to the fundamental point: What Dahl upholds as a “good society”—or, as people like him see it, the best possible society—is one in which the role of the masses of people, of the citizens, is reduced to acting as a “check” on the elites who actually make political decisions. This is another expression of the notion that the best possible political system is one in which there is not one supposedly uniform and monolithic elite, but competing elites, and the “freedom” of the masses of people—including the preservation of their human rights and liberties—resides ultimately in their ability to choose among, and perhaps maneuver between, competing elites. The presumption is that, particularly through the medium of elections, this will somehow cause the elites to compete for the people’s support in such a way that somehow the will of the people will be exercised in setting the direction of society, to the degree that is really possible in a modern, complex society.
Well, to more thoroughly refute this, to demonstrate what it amounts to in reality—and to make clear that it is possible to have a radically different and much better kind of society, in which the role of the people is actually to be the decision-makers, through an overall process which takes place in a qualitatively different way and in a whole greater dimension than anything practiced, or even conceived, by the rulers and political theorists of capitalism (and previous forms of society in general)—let’s begin with the following, speaking to the essential nature and role of elections as the ultimate expression of democracy in bourgeois society:
To state it in a single sentence, elections: are controlled by the bourgeoisie; are not the means through which basic decisions are made in any case; and are really for the primary purpose of legitimizing the system and the policies and actions of the ruling class, giving them the mantle of a “popular mandate,” and of channeling, confining, and controlling the political activity of the masses of people. (Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, p. 68)
To illustrate this further—and to further highlight what is wrong with the notion of influencing competing elites in a way that will benefit the people—let’s turn to a similar argument that was made by Malcolm X. Much as I love Malcolm, it is necessary to point to the limitations of his view of and approach to this—which ultimately flow from the fact that he had not taken up the scientific, materialist and dialectical, viewpoint of communism (although his development was in motion and was cut short by his assassination). In a speech which, back in the day, I listened to over and over again, and which I still enjoy in many ways, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm goes into a whole argument about how Black people shouldn’t be slavishly dependent upon and loyal to the Democrats. With his typical sharpness and biting wit, he speaks of how the Democrats and the Republicans are of the same type—they’re both canines, both of the same family as the dog: one is a wolf and the other is a fox—and they are both against you. But, in the end, what Malcolm proposes is a familiar device: He argues that Black people in particular shouldn’t just be a tail on the Democrats—who simply take Black people for granted and never do anything for them—but instead Black people should form a voting bloc and reward, or punish, those who do, or who don’t, act in ways that benefit Black people.
Malcolm talks about how, at the time Lyndon Johnson became president, after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson flew back into Wash-ington, D.C., and the first thing he did, when his plane landed, was to look around for his friend Richard Russell. As Malcolm tells it, Johnson “gets off the plane and what does he do? He says, ‘Where’s Dickie?’ Now, who’s Dickie? Why, he’s that old racist, southern -segregationist, white supremacist Richard Russell. No, that man is just too tricky, ‘cause his best friend is still old Dickie.” [Laughter]
We shouldn’t trust those Democrats, Malcolm insists. And he goes on to talk about how some people argue that Johnson can handle the southern segregationists because he’s from Texas and he knows them. Well, says Malcolm, if that’s the argument, what about Eastland—a Senator who was one of the most overt southern segregationists—he knows the southerners even better. Why don’t we have Eastland for president!
Yes, Malcolm is very sharp in punching holes in this idea of relying on the Democrats—and it’s great to listen to this, even now. But then, ultimately, what does he say? Well, he argues, if Black people form a bloc, then the Republicans will have to come to us, and the Democrats will have to come to us, and we’ll go with whichever one will do more for us.
But what are the actual dynamics when this has been attempted? The Democrats come to you, and you put a bunch of demands on them and you insist: “Now, if you don’t do this, and you don’t do that, and you don’t do the other thing in our interests, why we’ll...we’ll...” [Laughter] You’ll what? You’ll vote for the Republicans?! You see, it’s very true, you’ve got the wolf and the fox, and one of them pretends to be for you and the other one doesn’t even pretend to be for you, as Malcolm explained. But those are your choices, as long as you play by the rules of the game that they have set up. So, what leverage do you really have in this game? If the Democratic Party’s role is to talk, at least sometimes, in terms that make you think that maybe with enough pressure applied to them you can make them adopt some of the things that you believe are really important—and if you try to put pressure on them to actually do that by threatening to vote for the Republicans—well, then, either openly or behind closed doors they will laugh uproariously, because they know you can’t go and vote for the Republicans, who don’t even pretend to be for those things that are important to you.
So, even on those terms and on that level, you have no leverage against them. They have you—you don’t have them—as long as you are looking at things as being concentrated within and finding their only (or their best possible) expression within these, yes, very killing confines of bourgeois elections (and bourgeois politics overall). It is only by breaking out of those confines that you can actually begin to influence things in a significant way—by going up against the whole operation of this machinery, breaking free of it and challenging it in a meaningful way.
The following from Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That? helps to provide a concentrated summation of crucial points that are at issue here:
Many will say: how can the political system in a democratic country like the U.S. “serve to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat” when everyone has the right to choose the political leaders by participating in elections? The answer to this is that elections in such a society, and the “democratic process” as a whole, are a sham—and more than a sham—a cover for and indeed a vehicle through which domination over the exploited and oppressed is carried out by the exploiting, oppressing, ruling class.” (Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, p. 68)
In order to have a deeper and more solid foundation for a correct understanding of this question, and to recognize more fully how apologies for bourgeois democracy, like that of Robert A. Dahl, represent fundamental distortions of reality, it is crucial to turn once again to the question of outlook and method—to the decisive importance of dialectical materialism, and, on the other hand, the striking lack of materialism (and lack of dialectics grounded in materialism) in bourgeois-democratic views and analyses.
One of the most basic truths that dialectical materialism brings to light is that the political and ideological/cultural superstructure in any society—and this definitely includes the U.S.—corresponds, and fundamentally can only correspond, to the character of the economic base of that society—in other words, to the underlying social and, above all, production relations and to the class relations and the forms of exploitation and domination that are rooted in those production relations. In a capitalist society, such as the U.S., the capitalist class predominates in the ownership of the crucial means of production; at the same time, there is a large group of people—the working class, or proletariat—numbering in the millions and millions in the U.S. today, who own no means of production and therefore can live only by working for, and being exploited by, the capitalist class which monopolizes ownership of the means of production; while some others own a small amount of the means of production, and perhaps employ a few people, and so constitute a part of the middle class (or petite bourgeoisie).11 If the superstructure—and in particular the political processes, institutions, policies, and so on—come into any kind of serious conflict with the dynamics of the underlying capitalist economic base and its process of accumulation, then the whole functioning of society will be seriously disrupted and, unless you’re prepared to follow that through to its full conclusion—in other words, to the overthrow of the system—you’ll be forced to recoil from that and to adjust things (to adopt or accept policies) so that the superstructure is once again brought back into conformity with the fundamental nature and functioning of the underlying economic base and the whole process of capitalist accumulation (as it takes place and takes shape not only in the particular country, but today more than ever on an international scale).
Grasping this is crucial in order to understand how and why things happen in society (and the world) the way they do, including how and why politicians act the way they do.
Why, repeatedly, are even people who know better on some level seemingly unable to help themselves and, time after time, vote for politicians who promise one thing and do another, and never really act in the basic interests of the people? This calls to mind the “Charlie Brown with Lucy” experience in the “Peanuts” cartoon: the scene where Lucy is going to hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick it, and then at the last minute she pulls the ball away and he kicks wildly without making contact. He keeps falling for it—and she keeps doing it. Many, many people who have gotten involved in mainstream politics in one way or another have had this kind of experience—repeatedly. Remember, during the “traveling road show” of Democratic candidates before the last presidential election, in 2004, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton articulated some of what people wanted to hear, but Time magazine declared early on in the process that, although Sharpton often got the best popular response, he was not a serious candidate. Why was he not a serious candidate, especially if he was getting the best popular response? Well, Sharpton’s hardly a revolutionary, but even the things Sharpton said during that road show (however sincere he may or may not have been) were outside the pale of what the Democratic Party could actually seriously pursue, even in an election, let alone what it could actually do in running the government.
From the beginning, the conscious representatives of the ruling class were very well aware of all this. Sharpton, whatever his individual intentions, performed a function, objectively, of drawing people yet again into the bourgeois electoral framework, in particular people with a lot of progressive inclinations who were (and today still are) very dissatisfied—or even deeply distressed—with the whole direction of things. And Sharpton actually articulated and advocated the “competing elites” orientation. For example, while being interviewed on one of the main news channels, Sharpton explicitly argued that the role of the masses is to influence what the elites do. Nonetheless, he was “not a serious candidate,” nor was Kucinich, because what they were putting forward, as limited as it was in terms of any real change, had nothing to do with what the actual dynamics of the system were bringing forth and required.
So then you ended up with Kerry as the Democratic candidate, and we all know what that was about. It’s the same “Lucy and Charlie Brown” routine, over and over again. Maybe this time they’ll actually hold the football...No, this time they will do what they always do, leaving you feeling the blues again when, yet another time, they do what they do—and not what you are encouraged to imagine they will do. That’s what their role is—that is, it is in line with the actual functioning of the economic base to which these politicians, in an overall and ultimate sense, have to conform and which they have to serve. Through a lot of complexity and struggle, the politics and policies of the campaigns, and of running the government, get worked out among those who represent the capitalist ruling class and the capitalist system, the fundamental dynamics of which shape all this and set its basic terms and limits.12
In relation to all this, it is crucial to grasp that what characterizes the political system in this country—and in bourgeois democracies in general—is a monopoly of political power not by elites detached in some way from the underlying economic base, but a monopoly of political power by a group of people who, yes, occupy an elite position, but most essentially are an expression of definite relations of class domination and, fundamentally, definite exploitative production relations. The political representatives of the mainstream political parties (the Democratic and Republican parties in the U.S.) are in an ultimate and all-around sense the expression, in the political-ideological superstructure, of the underlying production relations of capitalism and the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, particularly as this takes shape and operates in this era of highly globalized capitalist imperialism. They are the expression, in the political sphere, of the monopoly of ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class—which, through that control over the economy, also exercises a monopoly of political power, expressed in an ultimate and concentrated way as the monopoly of “legitimate” armed force, the control of the established armed forces and police of the country, along with control of the courts, the bureaucracies and the institutions and processes of government as a whole.
This fundamental reality—that all this is rooted in the underlying production relations and the accumulation process of the capitalist-imperialist system—is the fundamental reason why the “political elites” are not free to act any way they will—any way they themselves might like to—and, in a basic and overall sense, cannot makes decisions based on “mass pressure” that is exerted on them. While, in the face of massive political opposition and resistance—especially as this is manifested outside, and in opposition to, the established political framework and processes—they may be forced, in the short run, to make certain concessions, they will then work to reverse this, in the short run or over time, and in any case they are not free to act in a way that runs contrary to the fundamental class interests they represent, and to the production relations in which those class interests are grounded.
All this, again, is why, to put it simply, they act the way they do—repeatedly. This is why they say one thing and do another. This is why they get you to vote for them and then “sell you out” every time. This is why, for many years, the Democrats have had “no spine,” in opposing what the Bush regime has been insisting on doing. What exists, and is expressed, in the political system is, above all and in essence, a monopoly of political power, not for “un-rooted elites” floating free in the air, but for a class. And when, or to the degree that, the “political elites” actually do “compete,” they do so most fundamentally on the terms of that class and of the system in which that class dominates, and in an effort to win the approval and support of that ruling class (or particular sections of it). It is that ruling class which fundamentally and ultimately—including through struggle within its own ranks—determines what the parameters and limits of “acceptable” politics will be, who the competing candidates will be and what policies they will actually carry out.
It is important to emphasize the aspect of struggle within the ranks of this ruling class because it is necessary to have a living, scientific—dialectical as well as materialist—and not a crude, dogmatic and mechanical understanding of this. As I pointed out in an article that appeared in the newspaper of our Party, Revolution, in 200513 there is not a single “committee of the ruling class” sitting in permanent session and deciding all these things. Particularly in a large and complex imperialist country like the U.S., operating on the principles of bourgeois-democratic rule, things are much more complex than that, and decisions are arrived at through much more complex processes. But, in fundamental terms, it is the interests of the ruling capitalist-imperialist class that determine the character, and the confines, of political decision-making, including the electoral process and the actual functions this serves. Once again, deeply grasping this is crucial in understanding why politicians act the way they do and, in opposition to that, what are the actual means to effect social and political change, even short of revolution—and, ultimately, to make revolution in order to qualitatively and radically change the whole character of society and have that kind of qualitative and radical impact on the world as a whole.
All this points to the essential fact that what we’re dealing with here is a dictatorship. There is a lot of popular misconception—and a lot of deliberately-propagated misconception—of what dictatorship is, and what it is not. Commonly and popularly—and through the influence of bourgeois political representatives and theoreticians, media mouthpieces, commentators and “pundits,” and the rest—dictatorship is understood to mean the rule of an all-powerful and essentially maniacal Leader (with a capital L), like a Hitler (or, as it’s generally put out these days, a Stalin or a Mao); or it is presented that a dictatorship is where a small group of people exercise power without allowing any rights to the masses of people, any free expression of ideas, any right to political dissent, and so on. And, conversely, it is said that what a dictatorship is not is any society where you have elections with competing candidates and parties and where people are allowed certain civil liberties and human rights (recall the arguments of Robert A. Dahl cited earlier). But in reality, and as a matter of scientific analysis: A dictatorship is a system of class rule, a monopoly of political power, expressed in a concentrated way through a monopoly of armed force to maintain and enforce that monopoly of political power—which is exercised to preserve and to serve the underlying economic system and its production relations, and the corresponding class and social relations.
That is the essence of what a dictatorship is. A dictatorship may—in the case of bourgeois democracy, for example—allow people to vote on which group within the ruling class will exercise the functions of this dictatorship over them. What a brilliant scheme!—you not only exercise dictatorship, but you involve those being dictated over in fostering and reinforcing the illusion that they are not being dictated over.
At times you will hear some people, including some progressive people, say: “I refuse to acknowledge that I’m being ruled over.” Well, refuse to acknowledge it or not, you are. And your refusing to acknowledge it is only doing harm to yourself and others in the same situation, because you can’t change reality if you have refused to accept what that reality is. As much as Huey Newton, especially in his early years in leading the Black Panther Party, contributed to the development of a revolutionary movement in the U.S. (and helped inspire people who were building that kind of movement in other countries as well), he was fundamentally wrong—and he gave expression to a misconception that, in one form or another, has a great deal of currency these days—when he said: “Power resides in the ability to define phenomena and cause them to act in a desired manner.” You don’t exercise power by having some abstract ability to define phenomena any way you would like and thereby cause those phenomena to act in a desired manner. You exert political influence and ultimately exercise political power by recognizing the essential reality that you are dealing with—what the existing political power is rooted in, reinforces and serves; what the contradictions are within that, and the possible pathways of transformation; and where your interests lie in relation to that—and by acting accordingly.
The fact is that, bourgeois democracy is a very effective form of dictatorship. You have to give the bourgeoisie credit: they’ve really hit upon and “perfected” something very clever in terms of perpetuating their rule and their interests. And it makes sense for the bourgeoisie to determinedly and stubbornly cling to this, as long as possible, because it involves exercising dictatorship while allowing, and encouraging, people to feel that they are exercising the power which in fact is being exercised over them.
But this is, nonetheless, a dictatorship, and whenever any group (or at times even an individual) acts in any significant way in opposition to the actual interests that are being dictated, then out comes the sharp edge of this dictatorship. The whole history of the U.S. is in reality a testament to this. In periods of acute social crisis and mass outpouring of opposition, this becomes more clear—it bursts through more of the outward appearance and camouflage. For example, in the great upsurges of the 1960s and into the early ‘70s in the U.S., many people came up against this dictatorship, and began to get at least a sense of it. I remember myself being in situations of virtual martial law, where you couldn’t congregate in groups of more than a few—the police would forcibly break up any attempt to do so—particularly if it seemed to have any oppositional political purpose; and you couldn’t do things like openly pass out oppositional political literature. Well, in those conditions it was much harder for people to argue that there is no dictatorship in this country.
And we saw what happened, for example, in the L.A. rebellion in 1992. When the masses of people rebelled, the government didn’t say: “Let’s have a vote to decide whether we think their rebellion is justified or not.” They sent out the National Guard and then they sent out the Army. Why? “To restore order.” From the standpoint of the functioning of this system, that was a logical thing to do—to mobilize brute military force, with the threat of massively using it, in order to suppress an uprising that threatened the interests of the ruling class and the “order” that this ruling class, and this system, requires. It did not matter to the ruling class—or it was not accepted by the ruling class—that this rebellion was righteous, that it was an expression of completely justified mass outrage at years and years of brutal oppression. And even many people who might have identified with, or at least been sympathetic toward, the feeling of outrage that led to the rebellion—which was set off by the Rodney King beating and more specifically the acquittal of the cops who were caught on videotape beating him—were confused and conflicted by the rebellion, because the question was posing itself quite acutely: where is this rebellion going to go? Many people, particularly white middle class people, felt like this: “There is chaos in the streets...Are they going to come over to my house and burn my house down or take my things?” Even some people who think of themselves as progressive got caught up in that—but what they got caught up in, fundamentally, was a logic that corresponded to the needs of the system. The bourgeois system—whose oppressive functioning was the fundamental cause of the rebellion in the first place—required the reimposition, by open and brutal force, of order. In other words, it required the aggressive assertion of dictatorship acting on behalf of, and reinforcing the class interests of, the bourgeois (capitalist) ruling class and the production and social relations of which that bourgeoisie, in turn, is ultimately and fundamentally itself an expression.
If you didn’t want to see order reimposed in that kind of way, then you would have to affirm that it is better to have chaos and disorder, at least for a time, than to have the forcible reimposition and reinforcement of injustice. It takes a radical standpoint, verging on a revolutionary one, to take that stand—and to take it thoroughly, and in a deep way. It takes a scientific understanding of the actual relations and dynamics that are involved, and how what exists, and what was then being aggressively asserted, is the actual exercise of dictatorship—even with certain democratic forms—in the interests of a definite class, which is itself the embodiment of definite social and, above all, production relations and the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation through those production relations.
At the same time as this dictatorship has a monopoly of political power—expressed in a concentrated way as a monopoly of armed power—it also has a monopoly in molding public opinion, so that the way people are inclined to act politically is in line with the interests of the class which exercises political power—dictatorship—over them.
Some of this came through in the movie “Bulworth.” In that movie the Warren Beatty character, Senator Bulworth, has kind of lost it, but in losing it he’s come closer to the truth—he’s lost his inhibitions. Well, he goes to a candidates’ debate, and you have the Jim Lehrer types there from the media who are going to ask the questions of the candidates. They start asking him questions, but Bulworth replies: Oh, man, this is really ridiculous—the same people who pay us are paying you to ask us the questions! [Laughter]
Well, this is, in somewhat populist terms, a basic reflection, if not a thoroughly scientific analysis, of what actually goes on. It is the “same people”—in the sense of the same class that’s exercising political power—who also monopolize and control the media and the means of molding public opinion in various ways—not just through the news media, but in an overall sense in the culture as well, including “popular entertainment” (although in the realm of culture some opposition does get expressed, this is hugely outweighed by the predominant “message” that comes through, in various forms, in the service of the ruling class).
In Morris Berman’s book Dark Ages America, there is an important section that speaks about the lies that were told by the Bush regime going into the Iraq war. In reading this, for my own reference I marked the word “lies” next to every place where Berman pinpoints these lies: it goes on for page after page. Berman also exposes the role of the mainstream media in propagating these lies and viciously attacking people who attempted to counter them. He asks, rhetorically:
What to think of NBC, which fired Phil Donahue (in addition to veteran war reporter Peter Arnett), the only TV network host opposed to the war? Or CNN, which attacked Scott Ritter, who had headed the U.N. weapons inspections from 1991 to 1998, as “an apologist for and defender of Saddam Hussein,” because he claimed that the case for Hussein being “a threat to the U.S. worthy of war” had yet to be made? (Kyra Phillips practically called him a traitor during their interview, and Paula Zahn told CNN viewers that he had “drunk Saddam Hussein’s Kool-Aid.”) (Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006, p. 221.)
Well, this is perfectly consistent with the essential role of these media. That role is to mold and shape public opinion in such a way that when people think and act politically, they are conditioned to think and act within the confines and in the interests of the capitalist-imperialist system.
To cite once again Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?:
the much-vaunted freedom of expression in the “democratic countries” is not in opposition to but is encompassed by and confined within the actual exercise of dictatorship by the bourgeoisie. This is for two basic reasons—because the ruling class has a monopoly on the means of molding public opinion and because its monopoly of armed force puts it in a position to suppress, as violently as necessary, any expression of ideas, as well as any action, that poses a serious challenge to the established order. What Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto is more true than ever in today’s conditions: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” (Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, p. 71)
But all this does not mean that the ruling class of imperialists has everything all sewn up. There are profound contradictions in their system which, these days especially, are posing themselves in rather acute terms. And especially at those times when these contradictions become intensified and assume acute expression, this sharpens divisions within the ruling class itself and provides much greater openings for mass resistance to develop and to have effect. It also poses more sharply the need for revolution; and the further intensification of these contradictions may even lead to an opening for revolution.
Now, at the present time, this may not appear to be so true, because for reasons that I’ve analyzed before,14 one section of the ruling class (as represented generally by the Democratic Party) faces real difficulties in formulating and fighting in a consistent way for a systematic and coherent program that would really represent an alternative to the dominant program represented now in a concentrated way by the Bush regime.
Still, there are today significant conflicts within the ruling class. The fact that there are real difficulties for the ruling class—and, especially in the face of that, some real differences among them—is the reason that someone like Congressman Murtha, for example, could get a hearing in his criticism of the Iraq war. Of course, Murtha is in no way a representative of the people, and certainly he is not speaking on behalf of the oppressed people of the world, but he is speaking with great concern about serious problems that he sees arising already, and potentially much greater problems, for the U.S. ruling class. Murtha may get attacked, he may get shoved to the side, but he still has gotten a certain hearing, because there is enough conflict within the ruling class that arguments like his are treated as within the scope of “legitimate discourse,” on ruling class terms (and Murtha has certain particular credentials and connections—long-time association with the military, and so on—which make it more possible for him to say these things). I saw Murtha not long ago on Paula Zahn: he was talking about the murders of civilians carried out by U.S. soldiers in Haditha, Iraq, and Zahn went after him with her fangs bared. But what happened was interesting. He actually got angry and responded accordingly, rather than backing away from this—this turned into a rather sharp confrontation, which I don’t think was mainly staged. But someone like Murtha’s being able to express his views and to be taken seriously in a certain context, even while also being marginalized to some degree, is an expression of the fact that there are significant conflicts within the ruling class at this point; and the warnings being voiced by Murtha, along with some other ruling class figures, represent concern over much greater contradictions that could emerge and erupt.15
So, we shouldn’t look simply at the way contradictions within the ruling class are posed at this point, and see only the significant aspect of paralysis on the part of one section of the ruling class (grouped around the Democrats). We should look further, at the deeper dynamics and at the potential for all this to assume much more acute expression. This, of course, will have very contradictory effects. On the one hand, this can (to echo Lenin’s phrasing) provide further cracks, fissures and openings for mass outrage to erupt on a large scale. On the other hand, it will quite likely lead to even more vicious repression, including of any such mass eruptions and outbreaks of political resistance and concerted efforts to affect and change government policy.
But, just as we recognize, and emphasize, the profound point that (to paraphrase Marx) what is important is not what the masses of people are thinking and doing at any given time, but what they will be confronted with by the actual workings and dynamics of the system—and the ways this can impel them in the direction of thinking and acting differently—this also applies to the ruling class and to divisions and conflicts within the ruling class. What expression those divisions and conflicts take is not dependent primarily on what appears on the surface at any given time, or on the will of individual representatives of the ruling class, but on what are actually the underlying and driving dynamics. And if you go back to what is the larger grand strategy of the dominant force within the ruling class at this time (grouped now in and around the Bush regime) and look at what that is going to run up against as they pursue that and seek to go from one offensive to the next, you can see the potential for contradictions in the world and in U.S. society itself—including within the U.S. ruling class—to greatly sharpen and intensify, and you can, in turn, get a sense of the potential dialectic—the back and forth relation and mutual interaction—between that and what goes on among the masses of people.
This is a very important point: While the ruling class exercises dictatorship, it is not the case that it has absolute freedom and has no problems and no difficulties, is confronted with no necessity. In fact, at this time, the U.S. imperialist ruling class faces great necessity, and further necessity for it is being created by the way in which the core in power now (the Bush regime, for short) is aggressively pursuing its program (what we have referred to as its juggernaut of war and repression). We should keep in mind that those grouped around Cheney, and others aligned with them, first formulated a decade or so ago the grand strategy which has since become articulated as a national security strategy, after Bush took office. These forces have been arguing for this strategy since the early ‘90s—insisting, on the one hand, that there is an opening to make a leap in imposing American hegemony on the entire world in an unprecedented way, in a way that they believed would be unchallenged and even unchallengeable, but warning, on the other hand, that this opening will close after a certain period of time—other regional, and world, powers will emerge, and (they argue) if we don’t seize the initiative now, we won’t be able to continue the kind of momentum that will be necessary to do this. In formulating and advocating this strategy, they acknowledged that it would be hard to get the American people behind it—not that they let the people decide, but they do want to do this with the people deluded and following behind them to the greatest degree possible. This wouldn’t be so easy to do, they recognized, absent something like a new Pearl Harbor—which then happened on September 11, 2001. This does emphasize that the question of whether these ruling class forces might have played some role in the 9/11 events is something which should not simply be dismissed, but does need to be looked into, in a serious and scientific way. Yet, whatever the story is with that, September 11 provided them with their “new Pearl Harbor.”
But even that has turned into its opposite in significant aspects. It is not now the same situation it was when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, shortly after September 11, 2001. The Bush regime ran into much more massive political opposition when it turned its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq. A lot of people were confused: What does that have to do with the “war on terror”? Well, if you think it’s actually a war on terror, maybe it is confusing; but if you understand that, in fundamental and essential terms, this is a war for empire, then you can see that the war in Iraq has everything to do with it. But the Bush regime—as the driving force of the ruling class as a whole—ran into a very acute contradiction, because they were waging a war for empire in the name of a “war on terror.” That contradiction significantly rebounded in their face—it didn’t stop them from aggressively pursuing the war in Iraq, and the “war on terror” overall, but it created all kinds of difficulties for them, even within the U.S., besides the difficulties they’ve had in actually imposing their will “on the ground” (and from the air) in Iraq. And along with this, there are the continuing, and mounting, difficulties they have had in “pacifying Afghanistan” after their initial success in toppling the Taliban: There is a growing resurgence of resistance in Afghanistan which, unfortunately, still consists largely of the Taliban and other reactionary forces allied with it. At the same time, there is the real possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran, which is fraught with great danger not only for the people of Iran, and that whole region, and indeed for the people of the whole world, but also for the U.S. imperialists themselves.
So they don’t have everything all locked up. It is the nature of reality, and it is the nature of their system as a particular expression of reality, that it is full of and driven by contradiction; and even if certain contradictions are dealt with—either resolved or partially resolved or mitigated—this gives rise to new contradictions (or old contradictions in new forms). You go into Iraq, and then you’ve got the “cut-and-run” problem, the way things have turned out—the reality that, even if things are not going the way you planned, now that you have committed to this, and made it a major front of y