Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies

Michael Parenti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781612056623
  9781612056616
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317253402
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

From market crisis to market boom, from welfare to wealth care, from homelessness to helplessness, and an all-out assault on the global environment-these are just some of the indecencies of contemporary economic life that Profit Pathology takes on. Here, Michael Parenti investigates how class power is a central force in our political life and, yet, is subjected to little critical discernment. He notes how big-moneyed interests shift the rules of the game in their favor while unveiling the long march by reactionaries through the nation's institutions to undo all the gains of social democracy, from the New Deal to the present. Parenti also traces the exploitative economic forces that have operated through much of American history, including the mass displacement and extermination of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Parenti is a master at demonstrating the impact of monomaniacal profit accumulation on social services-especially health care-and human values. Here he takes us one step further, showing how unrestrained capitalism ultimately endangers itself, becoming a "self-devouring beast" that threatens us all. Finally, he calls for a solution based on democratic diversity and public ownership-"because it works."

Part One
Class, Race, and Empire

1
Thinking about the Great Class Divide

WHEN WE LEAST EXPECT IT, when we slump disheartened not daring to hope for signs of popular uprising, seeing no movement on behalf of peace and social justice, there sometimes bursts forth a cry of resistance in one or more places. Unannounced, the anger of the common people so impressively shatters the deadening silence long imposed by the powers that be. Half the world wakes up. Suddenly the democracy takes to the streets. The ground itself seems to heave, as people ignite each other’s spirits. And we dare to think that we might create some regenerative resurgence, that we might break through the repressive strictures and structures imposed by privileged powers.

An Awakening of Political Consciousness

No one predicted the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings of January 2011, not the Middle East experts who serve in the US State Department and in the CIA, not the area specialists in academia, and certainly not the chatterbox media pundits who say so little about so much, followed by so much about so little. No one predicted the turmoil that surfaced in almost a dozen countries during the popular ferment that was labeled the Arab Spring. If they did expect these insurgencies, they very much kept it to themselves.

Likewise no one predicted the uprisings that were to boil over within the United States itself, beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement that spread across seventy cities and hundreds of other US communities, followed immediately by similar Occupy actions in scores of other countries around the globe.

Among the impressive things about the Occupy movement was its explicit enunciation of class conflict. It did not begin as Occupy Capitol Hill or Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue or Occupy Fort Bragg. It skipped all the adjunct institutions and stalked the beast to its lair: It began as Occupy Wall Street. The target of protest was nothing less than the very heart of finance capital, the moneyed class whose wealth and power constrict our standard of living while having its way with our bedraggled republic and our battered environment.

With a daring plunge into reality, the Occupy movement in America issued pronouncements about the 1 percent who are exploiting the 99 percent, a perfect publicity formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, even occasionally winning the passing attention of some mainstream media commentators (if only to be scoffed at).

For decades some few of us have been urging others to focus on the great class divide that imposes its distorting and painful effect on life at home and abroad. Within the Occupy movement and without a moment’s hesitation, people were now suddenly speaking about the 1 percent who grew obscenely rich off the backs of the 99 percent. Here was a long-awaited recognition of class exploitation in America.

The protestors carried signs uncovering the many disguises that class struggle assumes. Their posters and banners condemned the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses and limitless profiteering perpetrated by giant corporations, and the enormous tax loopholes they enjoyed, the disheartening profit-driven abuses of our medical system, the immense inequality of incomes and cruel attrition of poverty, and the financial thievery perpetrated by banksters and other corporate gangsters who feed from the public trough. The Occupy movement put it all on the table, the very issues that the plutocratic interests would never care to address.

The Occupy movement was accorded very little respectful attention by the corporate media. Media people know for whom they work. Often do they gaze at the great class divide and see only harmony and goodwill. Often they dismiss the gross inequalities as a delusion fabricated by “conspiracy theorists” and other “self-appointed” agitators.

Over the last two decades or more, the professional opinion makers who overpopulate the Congress and the mainstream media have been denouncing as “class warfare” any criticism posted against the corporate rich. Popular protest against the mean but smooth system of financial expropriation is denounced as disruptive and divisive. If we listen to the powers that be, our society presumably enjoys a pastoral harmony among its various socioeconomic classes, save for some malcontents.

Class as a Dirty Word

Many members of the 1 percent will even insist that “class” is an archaic term that has no place in American political discourse. Yet they are the first to summon it up and point to themselves as victims of a class war supposedly launched by elements within the 99 percent. In other words, whenever we accuse them of perpetrating class war against us, they accuse us critics of instigating class war against them.

The very mention of the word “class” is a touchy matter in American political discourse. Class is a concept that is strenuously avoided by mainstream opinion makers, most economists and other academics, and even many who claim to be on the political left. When certain terms are eliminated from public discourse, so are certain thoughts. Dissident ideas become all the more difficult to pursue when there are no acceptable words to express them.

With the C-word out of the way as some kind of indecency, it is then easy to dispose of other politically unacceptable concepts such as class privilege, class exploitation, class interest, class power, and class struggle. These, too, are judged no longer relevant in a society that supposedly consists of the fluid pluralistic interplay of diverse “groups.”

The moneyed class in this country has been pursuing class warfare against the working populace for more than two centuries. But when we point this out—when we marshal terms like class warfare and class conflict to describe the system of exploitation we live under—our indictments are dismissed as Marxist ranting, ever so indecent and divisive. And we are dismissed as ideologically inspired cranks. For decades, class has been dismissed as an outworn Marxist notion out of place in contemporary American society. It is a five-letter word that is treated like a dirty four-letter one.

Amanda Gilson put it perfectly: “The concept of ‘class warfare’ has been hi-jacked by the wrong class: the ruling class. The wealthy have been waging war silently and inconspicuously against the middle and the poor classes for decades! Now that the middle and poor classes have begun to fight back, it seems the rich want to try to call foul—the game was fine when they were the only ones playing it.”¹

The reactionary corporate rich have always denied that they themselves were involved in class warfare. Indeed, they insisted that no such thing existed in our harmonious prosperous society—if only the rest of us could understand that.

In the mainstream media, in political life, and in much of academia, “class” is still a verboten word. If you use it, you make your listeners uneasy (“Is the speaker a Marxist?”). In academia, one need only pose a question about the class interests involved in this or that issue and one is likely to be called out for pursuing doctrinaire Marxist notions. I speak from personal experience after working many years in academia.

There are costly sanctions if you persist in talking or writing about class exploitation and class inequity. Even more severe sanctions if you try to buttress your beliefs with actions on behalf of peace and social justice. You are likely not to get far in your journalism career or in public life or in academia, especially in fields like political science and economics. Again I can speak from the experiences of my career and the careers of others of kindred persuasion.

Most individuals involved in political discourse learn to talk around the subject of class conflict and class power. Instead of working class, we hear of “working families” or “blue collar” and “white collar employees.” Instead of lower class we hear of “inner-city poor” and the “unemployed.” Instead of the corporate capitalist owning class, we hear of the “more affluent” or the “upper quintile.” Don’t take my word for it, just listen to how the politicos speak. Many of them—like President Obama—settle for an even more cozy and muted term: folks, as in “Folks are strugglin’ along,” uttered in a folksy tone.

Class is used with impunity and mainstream approval only when it has that magic, neutralizing adjective “middle” attached to it. The middle class is an acceptable mainstream concept because it covers—rather than exposes—the great divide; it dilutes and muffles critical consciousness. A Pew survey in 2008 found that 91 percent of respondents believe they are either middle class, upper middle class, or lower middle class. Relatively few identify as working class. And most of the people who live in poverty are nevertheless reluctant to identify themselves as poor or lower class or even just working class.²

Americans have a most imperfect notion of how unequally wealth is distributed in their country. And they have little idea of how rich the super rich really are. Instead millions of us embrace the mythology that nearly everyone in America is middle class—except for a few fabulously rich and a minor stratum of very poor. Hence there is little room for any awareness of class conflict. That may be changing as the Great Recession of 2008 lingers on and on, bringing a sharp decline to the middle class and devastation to the previously more solvent elements of the working class.³ The concept of middle class serves less well as a neutralizer when the middle class itself becomes a stark victim of capitalist rollback.

Class Power and Wealth

Class is also allowed to be used as a term of limited application when it is part of the holy trinity of race, gender, and class. Applied in that manner, the concept of class is reduced to a demographic trait related to lifestyle, consumption preferences, divorce rates, education levels, and income levels. In forty years of what was called identity politics and culture wars, class as a concept was diminished to something of secondary importance. All sorts of leftists and New Leftists told us how we needed to think anew, how we had to realize that class was not as important as race or gender or culture or ecology or personal liberation—as if class power did not have a crucial and bruising impact on all of these.

No, many of the New Leftists insisted, class does not occupy as important a role in life as these other demographic traits; it is a lesser component of identity politics. Race and gender are powerful and highly visible determinates of one’s destiny, locked into one’s very biology, and amplified by the prevailing racist/sexist culture—and many cultures around the world indeed harbor strong elements of racism and certainly sexism.

I was one of those who thought the concepts of race, gender, and class should not be treated as mutually exclusive of each other. In fact, they are interactive. Thus racism and sexism have always proved functional for class exploitation and oppression. Despite its omnipresent hold, class often has a lower visibility than race and gender—especially in the United States where we have been taught to be oblivious to the hidden injuries of class. Economic exploitation of us as workers, taxpayers, and consumers has been skillfully cloaked, especially in public discourse.

Some of us went further, pointing out that there is another definition of class that the propagators of identity politics have denied or at least overlooked, another reason to worry about the impact of class as a social force. Class should be seen as a social relationship relating to wealth and power, involving a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Without benefit of reason or research, this latter usage of class is most definitely dismissed out of hand as Marxist. The narrow reductionist mainstream view of class as a demographic trait keeps us from seeing the extent of economic inequality and the severity of class power and class exploitation in society, allowing many researchers and political commentators to mistakenly assume that US society has no deep class divisions, no class conflicts of interest, and no problems of class power.

To repeat: We should think of class not primarily as a demographic trait but as a relationship to the means of production, as a relationship to power and wealth. Class is not an entity, it is a relationship: class as in slaveholder and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and worker; class as in class conflict, class exploitation, and class warfare.

Once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we may be on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another usually verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to defend our own democratic and communal interests against capitalism’s insatiable encroachments. Finally the 1 percent is finding it somewhat more difficult to manipulate the 99 percent. And perhaps the 99 percent are beginning to locate themselves within the context of class exploitation and class wealth. Perhaps they are beginning to think for themselves, an activity that is often strenuously frowned upon in a universe of discourse controlled by 1 percent or, as we shall see, even far less than 1 percent.⁴

2
Ethnicity and Exploitation

A Quick History of the Boiling Pot

FROM THE EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD continuing into the late twentieth century, America was seen predominantly as an Anglo-Protestant preserve. For many Americans this was something of which to be proud. America also has been seen as a great Melting Pot, diverse peoples and cultures blended together to form a distinctly national amalgam. But the truth is less heartwarming than that. The process of multicultural amalgamation has been playing out within a context of social conflict, oppressive bigotry, and harsh economic exploitation—the kind of things seldom afforded serious consideration in this country’s public discourse.

An American Holocaust

Celebrating the great Melting Pot makes it easier for us to overlook the unspeakable violence and brutality of the earliest ethnic encounters, specifically the holocaust waged against the indigenous Americans (“Indians”). Some early European settlements engaged in friendly exchanges with Native Americans. These contacts were beneficial mostly to the colonists who were untutored in the ways of wilderness survival. But instead of a melting or blending, this ethnic experience brought a firestorm of extermination—perpetrated by the land-grabbing, Bible-thumping white settlers otherwise hailed as “our forefathers.”

In the centuries before Columbus, the indigenous peoples of what is now called North America lived well, husbanding their land without visiting ruination upon it. Their diets were wholesome, diverse, and well balanced, and they were given to hygienic practices. The Massachusetts Bay colonists attempted to “civilize and Christianize” native children by putting them in schools alongside their own white offspring. The native children, who wore relatively little clothing and bathed every day in lakes and rivers, could not stand the odors of the English children who rarely bathed and wore heavy clothing. More than once the native kids bolted out the schoolroom windows when they could no longer bear the stench. ¹

Worse still, the indigenous peoples had never been exposed to the toxic microbes carried by the white invaders. Hence, they had little opportunity to build up much physiological resistance. Mass portions of the native population were wiped out ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part One: Class, Race, and Empire
• Part Two: The Corporate Beast at Home
• Part Three:Cultural Aberrations and Other Oppressions
• Part Four: Global Rule and Ruin
• Epilogue: The Next Trip
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author