Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century

Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy

Robert W. McChesney

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781583674796
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the United States and much of the world there is a palpable depression about the prospect of overcoming the downward spiral created by the tyranny of wealth and privilege and establishing a truly democratic and sustainable society. It threatens to become self-fulfilling. In this trailblazing new book, award-winning author Robert W. McChesney argues that the weight of the present is blinding people to the changing nature and the tremendous possibilities of the historical moment we inhabit. In Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century, he uses a sophisticated political economic analysis to delineate the recent trajectory of capitalism and its ongoing degeneration. In exciting new research McChesney reveals how notions of democratic media are becoming central to activists around the world seeking to establish post-capitalist democracies. Blowing the Roof off the Twenty-First Century also takes a fresh look at recent progressive political campaigns in the United States. While conveying complex ideas in a lively and accessible manner, McChesney demonstrates a very different and far superior world is not only necessary, but possible.

1

America, I Do Mind Dying

Please, mister foreman, slow down that assembly line
I don’t mind working but I do mind dying.

—JOE L. CARTER, “Please, Mister Foreman,” blues song, 1965

THESE ARE PERILOUS TIMES for capitalism, the reigning political economic system of the United States and the world. The economy is stagnating, and Mother Earth is gravely ill. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, we face widening economic inequality, plutocratic governance, endless militarism and mounting planetary ecological degradation.

Not many years ago, this would have sounded hyperbolic to many people. But today, it is not just radicals who are sounding alarm bells. Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been writing about secular stagnation in the past year in remarkably alarmist terms, arguing that the rich economies may be caught in decades of slow growth. No less an establishment figure than former World Bank Chief Economist and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers warned the International Monetary Fund in 2013 that the United States and the advanced economies may be facing a generation of stagnation.¹

Moreover, some of our leading social and natural scientists have recently established the magnitude of the difficulties we face with cutting-edge research. There is now wide agreement on what the influential French economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated, which is that growing economic inequality is built into the core logic of the capitalist system.² His research also suggests that a new oligarchy of inherited wealth has come to dominate society and the state, and the process is accelerated by stagnation. According to Krugman, writing on Piketty’s discoveries, “We’re going to look back nostalgically on the early 21st century when you could still at least have the pretense that the wealthy actually earned their wealth. And, you know, by the year 2030, it’ll all be inherited.” Indeed, “we are seeing not only great disparities in income and wealth, but we’re seeing them get entrenched. We’re seeing them become inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagine we’re nothing like.”³

In other acclaimed new empirical research, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined 1,800 policy decisions made by the U.S. government between 1981 and 2002:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. . . . Ordinary citizens might often be observed to “win” (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail.⁴

In short, when organized wealth wants one thing and the mass of the people wants another, money wins—always. “Democracy” has been reduced to powerless people rooting for their favored billionaire or corporate lobby to advance their values and interests, and hoping such a billionaire exists and that they get lucky. Doesn’t that sound like the oligarchy that was explicitly rejected in this nation’s founding in Philadelphia in 1776, and reaffirmed in Lincoln’s speech at the bloodstained earth of Gettysburg some four score and seven years later?

Matters are, if anything, worse when it comes to our environment. The scientists on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report in 2014 that ought to terrify any sentient being. Its conclusion: continuing on the present economic path of “business as usual” will lead to certain catastrophe for human society.⁵ The failure of governments to enact effective climate policies, due in large part to corporate lobbying, is pointing us toward the worst outcomes. In the United States, for example, no law on the environment has been passed by Congress without the Business Roundtable’s approval since 1975. The Business Roundtable is a pro-business lobbying group composed of CEOs from the very largest corporations, including the handful of energy giants.⁶ With growing inequality and unlimited billionaire spending on politics, the already grave present moment may be remembered fondly decades down the road, if anyone is around to remember it.

In the coming decades we are almost certainly going to see a society the likes of which has never existed and can scarcely be imagined. I argue in this book that if that new society is going to be one in which we want to live, it will require fundamental change in the political economy. Capitalism as we know it has got to go.

Although this is a radical idea, it is not necessarily a marginal one. Criticism of capitalism is no longer verboten in the United States, especially among young people, and there is good reason to believe this critical stance may grow by leaps and bounds. Capitalism today does not appear to offer youth much hope, and as a result, they are far more open to alternatives to it than their peers were a generation ago. In 2011 there were massive, almost spontaneous, demonstrations, beginning in Madison, Wisconsin, in February and then spreading in the fall to the various Occupy encampments nationwide. Such uprisings had not been seen in the United States for decades, maybe generations. A sleeping giant, it seemed, had been awakened and aroused, its power harnessed by young people. Since 2010, I have given around two hundred public talks across the United States on these themes, roughly half of which were on college campuses, and I couldn’t help but notice the heightened awareness.

Yet, especially after 2011, the optimism generated by these movements had dissipated, and the most arresting sentiment I encountered as I traveled the nation was one of tremendous pessimism about the possibility of progressive social change. While I found support for my critique everywhere I went, in a manner I had never experienced before, I also found people had concluded that there were no alternatives to the status quo. Or, if there were alternatives, there was no way to bring them into being. The fix was in, and political activity could not yield positive results. It was hopeless, and only deluded fools would bother to think otherwise. The ironic lesson of the Wisconsin uprising and Occupy was not that there was a vast underground ocean of untapped and inchoate support for progressive and radical politics in the United States, but rather that we had been there and done that and it had failed. Game over.

One is reminded of the title of one of William Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay Dying—a sad reality for an individual, but an unthinkable tragedy for an entire society or civilization.

By the fall of 2013, when I was on a 60-event speaking tour for Dollarocracy with my co-author John Nichols, the pessimism was so predictable and palpable that we altered our talks and became ersatz motivational speakers. We said that it was too early to harshly judge the impacts of the Madison uprising or Occupy. Effective social change requires more than showing up at a demonstration and holding a sign, as valuable as that may be. John discussed the extraordinary growth of grassroots activism on a number of progressive issues, including a campaign to amend the Constitution to get money out of politics—a beat he covers for The Nation. Because there was almost no mainstream news media coverage of these grassroots developments, people assumed they did not exist.

In my talks I emphasized that it was human nature to assume something entrenched at the moment will remain so into the future. People rarely accurately predict social change; it is almost always a surprise, so we have to keep our minds open to the possibility. No one saw the Madison uprising coming, or Occupy. Howard Zinn used to talk about how no one saw the civil rights movement coming, either. The immediacy of the present weighs like a 300-pound barbell across our chests as we attempt to look ahead. The shift from hopelessness to hope can be very sudden. Occupy showed us that. One can’t judge from current sentiment.

I told the story about how one of my professors in graduate school was a white South African who had moved to the United States in the 1960s and was strongly supportive of the anti-apartheid movement. He had family in South Africa and followed political developments there voraciously. I went to say goodbye to him just before I moved to Madison in May 1988 and found him unusually glum. I asked him what was wrong. He said that the political situation in South Africa was the worst he had ever seen and the chances of abolishing apartheid were more remote than ever. He said that the only way blacks would get justice would be through extraordinary, almost unimaginable, violence that would make the country uninhabitable for anyone. He depressed me, too, because he knew more about South Africa than anyone I knew by a wide margin.

So what happened? Two years later, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Four years after that, he was the first elected president of a post-apartheid democratic South Africa. And in those intervening six years, there was less violence than one might find in a New Jersey bar fight on a Saturday night. My friend, the most knowledgeable person I knew about South African politics, at the precise moment before this revolution occurred, had it exactly wrong—180 degrees wrong. (I learned subsequently that his pessimistic view was not uncommon at the time among anti-apartheid activists.)

From that I learned humility. And I also learned that the future is impossible to predict. There was only one Nostradamus. So we should not allow predictions about the likely course of future events to limit how we proceed with our lives. As Noam Chomsky put it, if you act like social change for the better is impossible, you guarantee it will be impossible. That is the choice we all have to make when we look into the mirror. Pessimism is self-fulfilling; it is no way to live.

Then what is a person to do in times like these, when the prospect for change seems dim, yet the conditions of society are unraveling and untenable? Our job is to understand the present and put it in historical perspective. It is to grasp the dynamics, the tensions, and the contradictions. It is to be prepared so that as crisis points emerge or explode onto the scene, as they inevitably do, people will be in a position to generate humane and sustainable solutions. We know the roof is going to get blown off the status quo. What we don’t know is if it will be change for the better . . . or not. That will depend upon what we do now and in the coming years.

THIS IS WHY I decided to do this book. I wanted to respond to the sense that we are entering perilous times and provide a sense of how we might imagine and achieve a brighter future. I had written a handful of essays that addressed the politics of this period and provided a diagnosis of the crises of the U.S. political economy. I had also written related pieces on media politics and the burgeoning media reform movement, of which I am a part. These essays form the core of this book, and I have added several chapters written with this book in mind, to give the volume coherence and to formally make my case.

The basis for my argument is that the United States and the world experienced a sea change with the economic collapse of 2008. The crisis was not a fluke or an accident; it was the result of core problems built into the modern capitalist system that give it a pronounced tendency toward economic stagnation. The massive growth of the financial sector and the mountain of consumer debt that preceded the Great Recession did not create stagnation; these were, in fact, the antidote to stagnationist tendencies dating back to the 1970s. But the spur that financialization gave to capitalist growth produced a bloated debt structure that was unsustainable. In the book I wrote with John Bellamy Foster, The Endless Crisis (Monthly Review Press, 2012), we explained the stagnationist tendency in modern U.S. capitalism, and why mainstream policy prescriptions can offer no solution to it, except austerity, which brings only more stagnation, not to mention unnecessary misery and hardship for the vast majority of the population.

Stagnation aggravates all the great historic problems associated with capitalism. Economic inequality mushrooms, poverty increases, public services are slashed, there is tremendous downward pressure on wages. And at the same time, corporations and wealthy investors successfully demand ever greater concessions from governments and communities as the quid pro quo for their investment. Capital generally struggles to find profitable investment outlets, but today the problem is particularly acute. In 2014 there is by some accounts as much as $2 trillion in capital sitting on the sidelines while there are tens of millions of workers unemployed or only partially employed. It has been this way for years. By any objective measure, this is socially absurd.

The current pattern for capital is to zero in on public services like a heat-seeking missile and to take over those government operations and convert them into profit-centers for corporations. Many government activities have been, or are in the process of being, privatized or outsourced, from the military to surveillance to prisons to education. The evidence demonstrates these privatizations and outsourcings basically benefit the investors, who often reap monopoly profits, but degrade the quality and cost efficiency of the services otherwise. They are corrosive to effective democratic governance.⁷ Likewise, government regulations to protect workers, consumers, and the environment have to be jettisoned to encourage the “job creators” to get off their butts and swing into action. These have proven to be palliative measures for ravenous investors, but a disaster for everyone else. To stay alive today, capitalism is eating our future.

My recent research has tracked dimensions of this broad crisis. In The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books, 2010), John Nichols and I chronicled the historic tension between commercialism and democratic journalism. This is what led to the creation of professional journalism a century ago, a system that improved upon the blatant corruption and owner propaganda of what immediately preceded it but also had deep flaws. In the past decade, especially since 2008, the corporate sector has abandoned the hope of making a profit from doing journalism, and the news media are in freefall collapse. There is dramatically less reporting and coverage of politics and the affairs of state than a generation ago, and the situation is getting worse every year. This is unacceptable for an ostensibly self-governing society.

In my 2013 book Digital Disconnect (New Press), I examined how the Internet has been converted from a “militantly egalitarian” space, as Netscape founder Marc Andreessen put it, and an anti-commercial zone as recently as the early 1990s, to the center of capitalism that is extending the market into every aspect of our lives. The Internet, rather than being an engine of economic competition, has spawned the greatest monopolies ever known to capitalism in the course of less than two decades. This has seriously undermined its potential to be a force for democracy.

This point bears elaboration. In their 2014 book, The Second Machine Age, M.I.T. business professors Erik Brynjolffsson and Andrew McAfee describe the mind-boggling digital technologies that may be on the verge of revolutionizing manufacturing and overall economic productivity in a manner comparable or superior to the first great Industrial Revolution. This digital bounty, they suggest optimistically, provides the basis for eliminating poverty worldwide, cleaning up the environment, and generally taking civilization to staggeringly unimaginable heights. But as even these unvarnished champions of capitalism concede, the way capitalism works means that this almost certainly will not take place because there is no place in digital capitalism for the preponderance of the population to gainfully participate. Brynjolsson and McAfee conclude that strong policy measures are mandatory to aggressively counteract inequality.⁸ Or, to put it in my language, the digital revolution will have the ironic effect of aggravating all the core problems of contemporary capitalism that are highlighted at the top of this chapter.

And what are the chances that the U.S. government will institute policies to radically decrease economic inequality and see that the economy works for all? In Dollarocracy, John Nichols and I provided a detailed look at the “money and media election complex” that has decimated the caliber of the American election system and has made the governing process evermore the domain of wealthy interests. In the book we present the developments as part of a broader campaign, begun in the 1970s, by corporate America to crush the democratic gains established from 1900 to 1970 and return control over the government to the wealthy, as in the Gilded Age.

These books—which addressed capitalism, communication, and democracy—do more than provide a diagnosis of a problem; they provide a battery of tangible proposals that, if enacted, would go a long way toward asserting the primacy of democratic values. Because journalism is a public good, the proposals center on the creation of independent, uncensored, nonprofit, and noncommercial news media, that would have sufficient public funding but whose content the government could not control. As for the Internet, the key is to eliminate corporate monopoly bottlenecks, eliminate commercial and government surveillance, and make access ubiquitous and free. With regard t...