Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics: Social Science or Cold War Propaganda?

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Bruce Lerro

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Prefatory Note

The field of comparative politics took off in the 1950s in Mordor and for many years it never lost its heavy anti-communist tinge. It continues to take for granted the fact that democracy exists (sic) in the United States and compares it favourably to "authoritarian" societies of communism, a convenient Cold War dualism. Its definition of politics. It is lopsidedly insensitive to cross-cultural definitions of politics. Historically, its definition excludes the politics of egalitarian hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturalists who comprised well over 90% of human history. Comparative politics is part of a self-propagandizing triumphalism that includes domestic political science, neoclassical economics and international relations theory. All these fields are ideological smoke screens that keep the West from facing its deep political and economic decline in the face of the rise of the East.

Orientation
What is politics?

Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics
In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics.

Temporal reach

How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

Cross species scope

Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social such as lions or wolves, but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

How much does evolutionary biology impact politics?

At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

Spatial reach

Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in private space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she said she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding this political?

Political agency

Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month?

What is the relationship between politics and power?

Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, in what way? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a means to another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power the end?

Politics, force and coercion

Let’s go back to this movie issue. Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being yelled at. Is that politics?
This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent? Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that the only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

Interdisciplinary span of politics

How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics? Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right?

As it turns out, the field of cross-cultural politics I will be discussing gives very narrow answers to these questions and therefore leaves a great deal out.

Temporal reach – narrow, starts with class societies and leaves out tribal societies
Cross-species – narrow, limits it to the human species
Is politics biological? Narrow, politics is limited to the social, psychological
Spatial reach – narrow, limited to what happens in states
Political agency—limited to what politicians do, no one else
Relationship between politics and power, wide, used interchangeably
How is politics related to force or coercion? Narrow, understates force
Interdisciplinary span of politics – narrow, it excludes economics
Theories of politics and ideology -narrow, it tries to make politics scientific and above ideology

In Part II of my article, I identity seven theories of politics:

Old Institutionalists

Civil Republicans

Weberian political sociologists
Marxian political scientists
Rational choice theorists
Radical feminists
Bio-evolutionary

All the answers comparative politics gives to those questions primarily come from two schools, the old institutionalists and rational choice theorists. They pretty much leave out the other five schools.

Connection to past articles
About three years ago I wrote four articles about the ideological nature of political science. One article Anti-Communist Political Science: Propaganda for the Capitalist State was primarily about political science as it is practiced in the United States (not Europe). The second article, Invasion of the Body Snatchersconnects political science to neo-classical economics and shows how both support each other while blocking out an integrated approach called political economy. In my third article Dictatorship and Democracy I expose how Mordor political scientists were quite interested in dictatorships both in Europe and even within the United States in the 1930s. On the other hand, their interpretation of democracy was thin and lacked any subsistence. Lastly, my piece Totalitarian Anti-Communism showed the manipulation of the use of the word “Totalitarian” from the 1930s into the late 20^th century. However, there is one topic that I did not cover in much detail and that is the subject of comparative politics. I did discuss it a bit in the last part of my first article but not in any depth. I would especially like to write about it now because while the field of comparative politics is not taken seriously outside the United States because its political manipulation is well-known, it still serves as propaganda for war and imperialism within the United States. It is as part of Yankee self-propaganda that discussing the field of comparative politics is still worth an analysis.

To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism and preserve Western imperialism, in one shot.

Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics
Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics are as follows. Ronald Chilcote wrote a very good criticism of comparative politics from a Marxian point of view. He was especially good at exposing the ideological nature in the field. For example he pointed out the connection between the social sciences and the CIA. Ido Oren was also really excellent at showing the connection between modernization theorists and the promotion of US foreign policy. Michael Latham’s book Modernization as Ideology
reveals how modernization theory was behind JFK’s international anti-communist program, Alliance for Progress. Lastly, Irene Gendzier’s book Development Against Democracy explains how the word “development” was used by comparative politics involved in foreign policy to railroad countries on the capitalist periphery away from socialist and communist transition programs.

Where are we going?
In this article I will show eight foundational problems with comparative politics:

Its treatment of nation-states as autonomous and not determined by alliances and between larger, more powerful states and transnational capitalists.

Oligarchies vs Democracy

Those of you who were unlucky enough to take a political science class might have been exposed to a cross-cultural version of the same thing. I refer to the field of comparative politics. The first thing that struck my eye in looking at the table of contents of a college textbook on comparative politics was the different types of rule. According to mainstream theorists, there are only two kinds of rule, democratic and authoritarian. The United States and Western Europe are deemed “democratic” whereas Russia, China and Iran are deemed authoritarian.

The unpopularity of democracy in the West until the 20^th century
One problem with this formulation is that it fails to address the unpopularity of democracy in Yankee history itself, not only among conservatives but liberals as well all the way to the end of the 19^th century. In the 19^thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19^th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.

In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick democracy” from the “thin democracy” of Dahl. My point is by the standards of thick democracy few if any Western countries are democratic. To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism. Since democracy is a loaded virtue word, and authoritarian is a loaded vice word, a cold war opposition between the two is built into the entire field of comparative politics.

How many parties make a democracy?
What is striking is the criteria for what constitutes democracy when it comes to political parties. For comparative politics, a single party rule constitutes authoritarian rule. But the addition of just one more party, as in the American political system, we suddenly then have a democracy. Countries with many parties including most of Europe are also constituted as democracies. Aristotle argued that there were 3 forms of rule – monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy is the rule of the few. Given the actual nature of who controls the elections in the United States, it is most reasonable to say the United States and Western Europe are oligarchies, ruled by the ruling class, the upper class and the upper middle class. Taken together this is about 20% of the population, hardly a democracy. In the United States most of middle class, working class and poor have no representation and yet the country is called democratic.

One party – authoritarian
Two parties – democratic
Many parties – democratic

In other words, the difference between one and two parties is greater than the difference between two parties and many parties. In fact, the implication of those who defend the two-party system is that having many parties can be confusing and unwieldly. So we wind up with the two parties of the United States as a kind center of stability. This is so despite the fact that for about the last 50 years, forty percent or more people in the United States do not vote. Is this a sign that democracy in the United States doesn’t work? Not at all. Those who don’t vote are dismissed as ignorant, apathetic or pathological in some way. The reason people don’t vote is simply because neither party represents their interest is never present. When voting tallies are presented, the number of people who don’t vote is rarely presented. Voting tallies are presented like 50% vs 49% for the two parties as if that constituted all the people who could have voted. In fact, in the actual tallies the winning party gets 30% of the vote. The loser gets 29%. What is ignored is the highest tally: 40% who don’t vote. This is democracy? What we have here is an oligarchy. But in comparative politics, democracy is not a process that actually exists but a self-congratulating ideology for the ruling capitalist oligarchs who control both parties.

Governing vs Ruling
In comparative politics, “governing” is a taken for granted term for Western capitalist societies. “Ruling” is saved for countries suspected of not being democratic, like “authoritarian” countries. I prefer to take the governing word very seriously as it is used in cybernetic systems. Governing in cybernetic systems means steering a system which includes goals, communication within the system, adaptation to the environment, feedback systems which allow for adjustment and few forward system which results in planning. The human heart is a “governor” of the human body. By these standards the only type of society in which there was governing was the egalitarian politics of hunting and gathering societies. Simple horticulture societies in these societies decision-making was collective. They adapted and moved when the ecology dictated a change.

For the last 5,000 years, complex political systems had rulers. This means that political goals were rarely carried out, communication systems were blocked and muddled by self-interested bureaucracies. Adaptations to the environment were slowed down by the machinations of the short-term thinking of ruling classes. Feedback systems were ignored such as extreme weather and pollution. Feed forward mechanisms were clogged by myopic ruling classes who couldn’t think three months ahead – if that. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies he describes how inept the ruling classes can be. Calling complex societies “governing” is ridiculous when compared to hunting and gathering societies which prevailed for 90% of human history. We are ruled by oligarchies and this should be reflected in any political field that considers itself scientific.

The Exclusion of Propaganda from Political Communication in the West
In part, the reason we have the illusion of democracy and a governing class rather than rulers of an oligarchy is because of Western propaganda. There are many textbooks describing propaganda in the West. If you like videos more than books, check out Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self. This video demonstrates how 100 years of psychological propaganda in the person of Edward Bernays and the brainwashing in the work of Ewen Cameron controlled the Mordor public. Despite this, the only mention of propaganda in my comparative politics textbook is when it comes of “authoritarian” regimes. No surprises here.

Comparative Politics Ignores Capitalism
Following the tradition of Mordor social sciences, just as political science excludes economics while neoclassical economics ignores politics, comparative politics ignores the economic system of capitalism when it discusses Western politics. They ignore economic exchange and act as if politics was merely system of law, voting, institutional systems of bureaucracies and foreign policies. Without saying so, countries that count as “democratic” have capitalist exchanges. The field of comparative politics theorists act as if there was a natural, unremarkable relationship between capitalism and democracy. But as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens have described in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, it was not the capitalist merchants that brought representative democracy to the West, but the working class. Capitalist economic exchanges should be foundational to understanding political systems. Yet in my comparative poetics textbook that I’m reading, “political economy” is buried in the last chapter of the book.

Two reasons why capitalism should be included in politics
Capitalism should be foundational to politics because countries that have counted as politically “underdeveloped” have become so because of capitalist imperialism, as Gunder Frank pointed out decades ago. At the same time capitalist societies should be foundational to politics because it was under capitalist crisis that fascism emerged. The political ideology of fascism can never be understood without its roots in capitalism. There has never been fascism in human history before capitalism and there has never been fascism without the presence of capitalism.

The Deep State and International Pressure Groups are not Included in the Decision-making Processes of Politics

Supposedly, democratically elected leaders of political parties govern their populations by carrying out “the will of the people”. I am countering this by saying these politicians represent the will of the oligarchs who rule over people. But the oligarchs do not just use political leaders to carry out their will. Besides capitalists that politicians have to answer to, there are agencies such as the FBI, the CIA as well as international pressure groups such as AIPAC, Five Eyes, and NED. None of these groups are mentioned in my comparative politics textbook as involving political decision making. The textbook on Political Psychology in International Relations writes as if political leaders make decisions for their nation by themselves. It is only in “authoritarian” societies that bureaucracies, revolutionary factions and terrorist groups come into play that constrain the decision-making will of the official political leaders.

Authoritarian Politics is Synonymous With Socialism

When it comes to the West the field of comparative politics ignores the fact that its ruling oligarchy is run by capitalism. However, they have no problem declaring that authoritarian politics goes with a socialist “command economy”. Western countries that became socialist, such as Sweden and Norway, are presented as socialist democracies only because the presence of a market or capitalism. This made the naturally socialist authoritarian states more democratic.

Most military dictatorships are capitalists

Advocates of comparative politics ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often attempts by capitalists to hold on to power in the face of socialist uprisings. Most dictatorships are not socialist, but capitalist installations. In the case of socialism, the textbook cases that are trotted out are the old Soviet Union, Cuba or China. These countries have oligarchies as well. But whether or not they are more authoritarian than the capitalist West is much more complex than it first appears. Theories of comparative politics play down or ignore the relentless international class war any socialist system has to endure on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis at the hands of the heads of state in the West along with their capitalist rulers. Capitalists in the West act as if the whole world is their private property. They treat any elected national leader (even if not a socialist) who has the nerve to set their own agenda for international trade as an enemy. All socialist leaders have to treat most any oppositional party in their country as potentially a tool of international capital. The extent to which socialist countries are authoritarian has a great deal to do with the pressure they experience from international capital.

What about “totalitarian”?

Fortunately, this Cold War vice word is now internationally discredited. However, the use of the term totalitarian to characterize socialist or communist countries, leaves out at least the following. If we grant that Sweden and Norway were once socialist, there has never been a socialist country with an advanced technology, communication systems, or advanced science. These societies have never had the ability to control the messages sent out to the population so that people were all thinking the same thing at the same time due to centralized control of propaganda. It is only advanced capitalist countries that have the capacity to do this. For example, Mordor’s media has roughly five corporations that all send out the same propaganda message in the case of Israel. People are severely punished by the police for supporting the Palestinians. All third parties in Mordor are blacked out. They cannot get into the “debates”. My point is that because of its control over mass media, capitalist control of the state is much closer to real totalitarianism than anything Stalin or Orwell ever dreamed up. The Soviet Union and China are poor countries. Their communist parties have no centralized control over their entire nation state. Peasants in both countries made up their own mind as to what was happening. Only in Mordor do you hear the same anti-working-class slogans against health care, or “welfare queens” from New York to San Francisco, from Houston Texas to Missoula in Montana. This is the power political propaganda holds to be internalized by people who imagine they are making up their own minds.

Comparative Politics Ignores Anarchism as Part of Socialism
The claim that all socialism is authoritarian ignores the 180-year history of the anarchist movement and its leaders from Proudhon to Bakunin to Malatesta, Kropotkin, to Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman to Durruti. Anarchism was no intellectual movement. It was followed by thousands of people who fought in and out of labor unions and in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This negligence on the part of comparative political theorists is ironic given that anarchism at its best is the purist form of democracy – direct democracy. If comparative political theorists understood the scale that the anarchists organized during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939, they would be ashamed to think that what goes on in Western societies has anything to do with democracy, at least comparatively speaking.

Comparative Politics Ignores the International Pressures Within Larger States or Alliances Between other States

Comparative politics acts as if political decisions begin and end at national borders and with only official political leaders. But today’s nation-states have formed alliances with other nation-states. They have agreements about where they or won’t all act together. In the West we have the alliance of United States, England and Israel. None of those countries enacts a political decision by themselves. The same is true with China, Russia and Iran. Nation-states are interdependent, not independent actors.

Conclusion

I began this article with nine foundational questions of what politics is. I described how narrowly the field of comparative politics is in answering these questions. Then I identified seven theories of politics and showed how each of the seven theories of politics answers these nine questions differently. As it turned out, the field of political science uses only two of the seven theories: old institutionalism as rational choice theory.

Then I embedded within this article other articles I had written about how anticommunist domestic political science and neoclassical economics are in their studies and how international political science (comparative politics) is in carrying on that tradition. After that I named eight areas in which comparative politics are weak, including:

Its propagandistic use of the word “democracy”. I claim that no state society on this planet is democratic. They are oligarchies.
Its propagandistic use of the world governance. I identify with a cybernetic definition of governance, using the heart as an example. With this as criteria, no state system in the world governs a society. They all rule, not govern.
Comparative politics over-emphasizes the use of propaganda in “authoritarian” societies while barely even mentioning propaganda in capitalist ruling oligarchies.
Comparative politics does not successfully integrate capitalism into the comparative systems it analyzes . One textbook tacks it on as a last chapter.
Comparative politics ignores the power of the institutions of the deep state and transnational capitalists in determining the decision-making capacities of politicians.
Its treatment of the term “authoritarian” is more or less synonymous with socialism. It plays down the existence of socialism in Scandinavian countries and communal councils in Venezuela.
Lastly, the use of the term “totalitarian” to depict Soviet Union, China and Cuba is completely false. In the case of the Soviet Union and China they were too poor to have a centralized state that could reach down to every peasant village and bombard them with propaganda. The foundation for this totalitarian state is a centralized media apparatus, mass transportation, a country that was electrified. Paradoxically it is Mordor’s control over its mass media where we see the closest approximation to totalitarianism.

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The West Only Has Pretend Heroes Like Spider-Man And SpongeBob

Be sure to distribute this article as widely as possible. Pushing back against the Big Lie is really up to you.

Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST

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The West Only Has Pretend Heroes Like Spider-Man And SpongeBob

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

As the US-backed atrocities in the Middle East get uglier and uglier, I keep thinking about something that was said by an Iranian cleric named Shahab Moradi after the US assassinated Iran’s immensely popular general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

Moradi complained that Iran can’t even really retaliate for the assassination because the US doesn’t have any real heroes of its own like Soleimani, saying, “Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob?”

I’ve never seen a more incisive and withering critique of western culture, and I probably never will. It’s such an accurate statement and paints such a clear picture of what this civilization is really like that it’s hard to imagine how anyone could possibly top it.

There are no real heroes with popular support in the western empire, because everything that’s truly heroic gets stomped down here, and everything that gets amplified to popularity is either vapid distraction or directly facilitates the interests of the evil empire.

Our own generals are busy butchering civilians for oil and geostrategic control.
Our military personnel are imperial stormtroopers.
Our police are the security guards of capitalism.
Our most prominent journalists are all propagandists.
Our most prominent celebrities are famous because of their ability to pretend to be fictional characters doing fake things in Hollywood movies.
Our most prominent artists are famous because of their ability to churn out formulaic pop songs about empty-headed bullshit.
Our most widely recognized symbols are corporate logos.
Our most highly regarded professionals are those who can sell westerners the most future landfill manufactured by wage slaves in the global south.
Our most well-known government leaders are those who’ve sold their souls to oligarchs and imperialists and can lie to the public most convincingly.

The only westerners doing truly heroic things here get thrown in prison, or murdered, or pushed into obscurity, because the only truly heroic thing anyone can do in today’s world is to take a stand against the western empire.

Those who bravely resist the US war machine or make themselves inconvenient for western empire managers don’t get to become popular heroes. You don’t see the westerners who work to stop weapons shipments to Gaza being celebrated for their efforts on CNN and the BBC. You don’t see anti-war activists getting Hollywood movies made about their work — at least not until the wars they were protesting lie safely in the distant past. You don’t see journalists who work to expose the most egregious crimes of the empire being elevated to fame and fortune.

The only figures who get elevated to fame and fortune in this fake plastic dystopia are those who either actively serve the interests of the empire or who passively distract people from its abuses. Donald Trump. Elon Musk. The Kardashians. Taylor Swift. Spider-Man and SpongeBob. [And a huge mob of sports figures and their media chroniclers and sycophants.—Ed)

Those are the only heroes we’re allowed to have here in any major way. You can have real heroes if you want, but if you tell the average westerner their names the first word out of their mouth will be, “Who?”

Every once in a great while someone will sneak past the many security checkpoints into fame and begin opposing the empire, but they are always quickly demonized and marginalized by the imperial perception managers. And for every Roger Waters or Susan Sarandon, there are a thousand imposter heroes making themselves extremely convenient for the rulers of the western empire.

This is the civilization we live in. A mind-controlled wasteland where everything is fake and stupid. The only path toward fulfilment and inner peace in such a dystopia is to dedicate yourself to tearing it down, brick by plastic brick.

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In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

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How Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire (w/ Christian Parenti) | The Chris Hedges Report

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How Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire (w/ Christian Parenti) | The Chris Hedges Report

CHRIS HEDGES

SEP 25, 2024

This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms.

Oftentimes the idea of “wokeness” or “woke” ideology, whether calling it as such or acknowledging its existence, can be thought of as coinage of the right wing. Christian Parenti, professor at John Jay College, journalist and author, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make the case that what he and many others define as “woke” is actually a weapon used to further suppress marginalized people, prevent the awareness of class politics and class struggle and further divide the working class.

“What a lot of the story comes down to,” Parenti tells Hedges, “[is] detaching class struggle from cultural struggles. And what woke is, is the continuation of all of the goals of the Enlightenment left, but in the realm of culture war, in the realm of cultural struggles, and that material conflict is increasingly elided and erased.”

Although the ideas behind “wokeness” attempt to foster a more egalitarian and inclusive society, it has been corrupted by the system itself and thus weaponized. “Woke ideology, wokeness, serves as an armory, an arsenal for the professional managerial class to draw weaponry and armor from in their increasingly Hobbesian war of all against all for posts,” Parenti remarks. For him, this is crucial to understanding the material incentive behind what wokeness stands for now as it continually appears in corporate and academic sectors.

“There are real material stakes for people, and one way a professional manager/member of this class can get ahead is by using these tropes to advance themselves and defend themselves,” he argues.

Its prevalence in today’s society, Parenti asserts, has cynically manifested as a reaction to corporations historically having to shell out millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements for discrimination and unethical cultural practices. Nowadays, in contrast, companies are very careful and even promote this ideology to appeal to marginalized groups—and ultimately raise their bottom line.

Enterprises like the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, Parenti argues, may present themselves as proponents of social justice but in reality “[they] are not established to and are not seeking to overthrow, undo or transform American capitalism. They are fundamentally about legitimizing and perpetuating it,” he says. It turns out that woke ideology is only their latest tool in doing so.

Thanks for reading The Chris Hedges Report! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Transcript

Chris Hedges

Woke ideology is pervasive in liberal institutions, especially universities, but does it further and hamper the liberal values and inclusiveness it purports to advocate? It seeks to transform society through what Christian Parenti calls the moralizing micropolitics of politicized etiquette. It is fixated on the politics of language and symbols, the sins of cultural appropriation and misnaming and calls for centering historically oppressed groups. It advocates identity politics, prioritizing race, gender, indigeneity, sexual orientation, physical disability, mental health diagnoses, immigration status and socioeconomic status over political content. Woke discourse, Parenti writes, “is imbued with a therapeutic mentality expressed in safety-obsessed incantations about harm, trauma, healing, care and doing the work. Personal struggles take precedent over political struggles. But, as Parenti argues, wokeness is deeply anti-intellectual, endowed with a moralizing that draws a distinction between the politically clean and unclean, friend and enemy, good and evil. It demands the censoring and cancelling of the politically incorrect, along with books and ideas. Woke culture has displaced old-fashioned universalist class politics – the fundamental struggle over who produces wealth, how and for whom. It not only divides the working class, but often serves, as Parenti points out, the interests of the ruling class. Joining me to discuss woke culture is Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York, and author of the recent article “The Cargo Cult of Woke.”

Okay, let's begin with the title, Christian. “The Cargo Cult of Woke.” Woke, where participants believe that social justice and perhaps even revolution can be achieved through the performance of safety oriented rituals of political etiquette. So let's define it. What is it?

Christian Parenti

Well, I mean, your introduction helped kind of define it. So I see it as having basically six key features. It's this, as you said, this micro-politics of etiquette... I mean, it's not going through all six of them. Woke is the dominant subculture of the left now, and it is highly destructive. If you critique it on the left, a lot of people deny its existences. Now, there's no such thing as wokeness or woke culture, or cancel culture, there's only accountability culture. But indeed, wokeness is a real thing, and it's a real problem for the left. So in this article, which was for Catalyst, the journal associated with Jacobin magazine, independent, but sort of a cousin-sister institution, maybe. It's a review essay of several books that came out over the last year about wokeness, some of them from the left, some of them from the right, even far right. And some of them sort of center. And I go through their explanations and try and unpack them, and there's actually a second half of this, which the article in its first draft was too long, and a lot of it was left on the cutting room floor, which I'm currently turning into another article which gets kind of deeper into the history of how the left arrived at this. But the main problem with wokeness is that it effectively purports to offer total transformation of society, even revolution. But it is in reality, it comes at the expense of Universalist class politics that seek to redistribute wealth and seek to change how wealth is created, you know? And does and seeks to grapple the questions of how wealth is produced by whom and for whom, right? Those questions drop away, and frequently, woke ideology purports to want to arrive at the same place many proponents of woke will even claim to be socialists and Marxists, but I argue that in reality, it doesn't add up to class politics, and it really, more often than not, comes at the expense of good old Universalist class politics. And the great irony, one of the greatest ironies in all this, is that it is, in fact, Universalist class politics that delivers the most for whatever hyper-variegated subgroup of the most oppressed there is. That might sound snide, but I don't mean it that way. So as I say in the article, you know if Black trans people suffer disproportionately from unemployment, lack of medical care, lack of adequate housing, etc. The irony is that universal provision of those goods would disproportionately benefit the most marginalized Black trans people, for example, right? We see that logic at work in Social Security. Everyone pays into Social Security, though the rich, of course, stop paying after whatever it is like $170,000, maybe it's $150,000. That's the first 150k you're taxed on. But anyway, the point is, everybody pays into Social Security according to their ability, and then everyone receives Social Security, both millionaires and elders, who otherwise would be homeless. And who benefits disproportionately from the Social Security check? The poor, the poorest benefit disproportionately. For the millionaires and multi-millionaires, whatever social security pays them doesn't have a material impact on their life. It's not that important, but the average working class senior, that check is transformative. If they didn't have that, millions of them would be homeless. So that, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when arguing for and considering a return to or an amplification of a Universalist class politics, that it is, in fact, very good for all of the ultra-oppressed groups who that woke ideology purports to serve more efficiently and foreground most. And I think, in other words, long story short, is that woke doesn't deliver on its own goals.

Chris Hedges

Well, as you write in the article, it's even pernicious in the sense that it's become a bludgeon in the hands of the corporate state. You call it authoritarian and profoundly anti-intellectual. You write, others on the left privately bemoan wokeness and its safety obsession, but in public, remain quiet for fear of attack from woke online mobs. I think this is especially true in universities. At Princeton, for instance, that woke culture has banned the great Black novelist Richard Wright as a misogynist, and so they don't teach him. But let's talk about that authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism.

Christian Parenti

Yes, I mean, I opened the article with a recent example of the anti-intellectual and authoritarian nature of woke ideology. The American and Canadian Anthropological Association at their annual meeting, canceled, unilaterally from the executive committee, canceled a previously approved panel called, "Let's Talk About Sex, Baby: The Enduring Importance of Biological Sex to Anthropology." And their explanation was that, well, this would be, this would cause harm to trans and LBGTQ members of the association. I mean, that is kind of bonkers that the Anthropological Association doesn't want to have a panel discussing, contemplating, grappling with what role should biological sex play in the discipline, right? And they didn't do it by some membership vote, it was done last minute after scheduling the panel, you know, from the top down. So, I mean, that's an example of the woke authoritarianism. But I mean, it's everywhere in that it's one of the preferred strategies these days, this cancel culture of, you know, online mobs targeting a person, going to their employers, their funders, whatever, and trying to get them fired, canceled, etc. I mean, we saw this with countless, countless people, many of whom deserved it but it also can run amok. So that's how it's authoritarian and I mean, it's anti-intellectual in that it has this intolerance, that you are not allowed to explore. If you're going to stay in the good graces of woke ideology, and those who report you, you can't ask difficult questions. You have to sort of assume the right language, etc, etc. I mean, it's also just incredibly divisive. One of the books discussed is Yascha Mounk's book, "The Identity Trap," and he has some really surprising examples of just like racially segregating five-year-old kids in some elite private school. There's a number of examples of this kind of, like, just racist, but in the name of anti-racism, segregation of young people in private schools, but it also examples of this in public schools. You just wonder, like, how could that even be legal? So in that regard, it's incredibly divisive.

Chris Hedges

You quote Adolph Reed at the end, and he refers to this anti-racism as class politics, I think it explained that idea. And also you note that while woke politics professes concern for the downtrodden, you say it's right in content because it is compatible with economic exploitation.

Christian Parenti

Yeah, so an example of that, that I cite in the article, is how the CIA had these online ads called "Humans of the CIA." One of them was a Latina who has this amazing, like, flawless woke riff about how...

Chris Hedges

You got to read it. Do you have it in front of you?

Christian Parenti

Yeah, it's pretty hilarious. Okay, here we go. Yeah, "Humans of the CIA." So this is what she says. She says,
I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I'm intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a flute or a slip through the cracks. I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, says this [inaudible]. But at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be, right?

So this is from the CIA, right? An organization that goes around overthrowing governments, assassinating people, and we should say, has a long history of meddling in American politics and American culture in very destructive ways. So if the CIA can try and legitimize itself with wokeness, then you know, that really shows you, kind of, how flexible it is, in terms of its relationship to power. Another thing came to mind, another example, this was Jamie Raskin, a year or so back, talking about how, you know, when ramping up to the war in Ukraine, how Putin was a homophobe and transphobe and all this sort of stuff. This is like, here is woke ideology in the service of a US proxy war. So it is completely compatible with all of that and actually, it's not just compatible, I mean, it's actually pretty useful to the American empire to legitimize it, to return some sort of patina of moral legitimacy to it. And in terms of Adolph Reed, at the end there's a section where I discuss how the professional managerial class embraces wokeness. So you have from the end of World War II to the present, the kind of old, petty bourgeoisie of the small shopkeepers and independent businesses is increasingly absorbed into the corporate structure, structures of universities, corporations, this kind of stuff. And there a class emerges, a class of workers, it should be said, they're fundamentally just workers, but they're a political constituency different from blue collar workers, right? The professional managerial class that has as its task, managing some piece of a hierarchy. No sooner does this class emerge and grow by the '60s and '70s, then does it also start to experience a new kind of precarity? There is, by the end of the '70s, the first experiments in what we would now recognize as neoliberal economic restructuring. Then, beginning with the Volcker shock of 1980 and Reaganomics, there's massive deregulation, tax cuts that facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth, massive deindustrialization, an expansion of the financial sector. And with all of that, the rhythm of the economic cycles of capitalism increases. You have more frequent and more extreme booms and bubbles. And connected to that, all of that, you have an increase in the creative destruction of the capitalist economy throughout the West, but particularly in the United States. And that means that this professional managerial class, pretty much as soon as it sort of reaches its peak form, also finds itself under all sorts of stresses. The company you work for is now likely to be bought out and restructured, and so people are constantly struggling to maintain their position. You see it very clearly in academia. The number of adjuncts has increased massively in academia, while the overall number of faculty has kept up with and matched the number of students, the number of tenured professors has shrunk radically, and the amount of people working on short term contracts is increased enormously. That introduces an intense precarity and fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich put it in her great book by that title. And so woke ideology, wokeness, serves as an armory, an arsenal for the professional managerial class to draw weaponry and armor from in their increasingly Hobbesian war of all against all for posts. And that is an important kind of material incentive for what drives this. There are real material stakes for people, and one way a professional manager/member of this class can get ahead is by using these tropes to advance themselves and defend themselves.

Chris Hedges

But you say in the process, you say, it erases class politics. ...remarkable.

Christian Parenti

Chris Hedges

No, go ahead.

Christian Parenti

Well, another material force behind all this is the law. And the last book I discussed is actually by a really, a pretty odious right winger, Richard Hanania, who was a self-admitted former racist. But his book, I must say, makes an interesting point. He says that a lot of what, that essentially woke culture is downstream from the law, specifically 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he doesn't like and would like to get rid of. But this is the interesting part of his argument. He says it's the weakness of the law that sort of perpetuates wokeness. What's he talking about? Well, the Civil Rights Act allows for private sector enforcement in the civil courts, and it has incredibly vague parameters. For example, for some reason that I'm honestly not quite clear on, hiring quotas have always been taboo in the United States. This is, I believe, Eisenhower said, you know, when first being confronted with civil rights legislation that in the military, that there wouldn't... as long as there weren't any quotas, right? Ever since then, maybe it was Truman, ever since then, this idea has stuck. But in fact, there are quotas. There are informal quotas. And so part of how you learn what, part of what you learn in modern academia is this kind of lying and double standards. Anyway, so in the vagueness of this law, and he compares it to some extent, with what's going on in France. In France, for example, there are certain laws against discrimination. For example, French firms have to hire a certain percentage of disabled workers. This is a quota. It's set by the labor ministry, and the labor ministry enforces it, right? In the United States, we don't have anything like that, that would be illegal, but instead, what we have is a law that says you, as a worker or consumer, person, you can sue institutions if you've been discriminated against. And so this leads to, I should interrupt myself for a second. There is also enforcement of civil rights law violations by the federal government, but a lot of the enforcement is left up to the private sector. So what has happened over recent decades is that corporate America has been faced with really expensive lawsuits, you know, $100-200 million at times by basically like, I think it's like 95% of the Fortune 500 firms have had to pay out pretty significant damages for various types of racial and sexist discrimination, right? So what do they do to defend themselves? Well, they start investing in the HR infrastructure and the outsourced HR infrastructure of diversity consultants and trainers, etc, etc. And they do this in hopes that they won't have, that they can, extirpate the racist and sexist managers, or at least the mentality of managers that might have those attitudes, get them to shut their mouths and stop costing the company money. But if that fails, they they also have a defense, because they say, look, to the court they say, look, you know, we invest heavily in trying to create an inclusive workspace. So that's a huge amount of money that goes to people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. And there's an entire industry, people make a fairly good living doing this kind of training around these woke ideas. And inculcating, also, it's not just ideas and arguments, it's a whole kind of sensibility, right? That's why it's a subculture. It's like concern with etiquette and aesthetics is absolutely important in it. And that's part of why corporate America, people are like, why does corporate America go into this stuff? To defend themselves against lawsuits because the history of 95% of the Fortune 500 companies having had to pay out large damage settlements because of their bigotry, right? So they invest heavily in this private sector, entrepreneurial infrastructure. And so then this cadre of experts, of course, see the need for their services everywhere. And as a result, you get certain kind of left ideas from social sciences extracted and distorted. For example, the idea of structural racism has become the notion of systemic racism. Structural racism is the idea that there are racist outcomes even when there isn't racist intent, that structures like housing markets, educational funding systems that are partly dependent on property values, how this can lead to, you know, unfair outcomes for different demographic groups, right? Systemic racism is the idea that racism is everywhere and in everyone, and that everything is racist. The two sound similar, structural racism, systemic racism. What's the difference? They're actually very different. So now this cadre that can siphon up money, not just from universities and foundations, but also from the private sector, is constantly pushing these ideas into sensibility, and that's a very important part of where it all comes from. Another part of where it comes from, which I left out of the piece but if I were to do it again and have more time, more space, the Obama administration plays a very important role in this. Mounk notes that the mainstream press turns woke in around 2010 and that all this predates Trump. This is not just a reaction to Trump, but that the use of terms like systemic racism increases by orders of magnitude in the New York Times, usage of it in the New York Times and The Washington Post, etc. And while he doesn't get into this, Laura Kipnis does in her book, which is not one of the books that is reviewed here, called "Unwanted Advances." And she shows how the Obama administration's interpretation of Title IX and the use of what it called "Dear Colleague" letters really kind of set off a kind of sex panic on campuses that she documents in a critical fashion. And that's a very good book, but I think that's a very important part of the kind of explosion of woke. Those Obama administration, "Dear colleague" letters about how Title IX is to be interpreted.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about social media...

Christian Parenti

Lest it be misunderstood. So Hanania, he wants to get rid of civil rights law. That's a terrible idea, but what I argue in this piece is that the evidence he shows can be used for the exact opposite conclusion, which is that actually maybe what we need is a clearer, stronger civil rights law. We need to have a larger role for government and maybe, you know, a discussion about quotas, since we informally have them but we deny it. And to get rid of this whole private sector, entrepreneurial, propulsion system for woke ideology.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about social media and you're quoting Mounk, "the rise of a popularized version of the identity synthesis to transform the ideas of serious thinkers," he's probably thinking of [Michel] Foucault, "into simplistic memes and slogans."

Christian Parenti

Yes, what's the question in that, like, what...

Chris Hedges

I want to know how that works. I mean, what's happened? So you have figures like Edward Said and [Michel] Foucault and others, but it's the reductionism, that how they're very complex, often, and especially with Edward, nuanced ideas are reduced to a simplistic formula to serve woke culture.

Christian Parenti

Well, I mean, that happens... I don't think that Mounk's account of that as particularly good. All the academics take up this case against post-structuralism. And I mean, they have a point. I mean, what happens... But the thing they leave out is the following: what happens simultaneously with the arrival of post-structuralism from Europe in the late '70s, early '80s, simultaneously, there is the legacy of McCarthyism, right? In the background of all this has to be understood the impact of the Red Scare. Taft-Hartley, so in the second half of this article, which I'm working on now, it's almost done, I get into the role of Taft-Hartley [Act]. This is very important, since Taft-Hartley doesn't just weaken organized labor in a quantitative sense, but also qualitatively undermines all sorts of practices of solidarity that help build class consciousness.

Chris Hedges

But let me just interrupt to explain. This is the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which essentially prohibits any kind of sympathy strike. It absolutely cripples the ability of striking workers to have any kind of impact.

Christian Parenti

Right, boycotts, sympathy strikes, these kinds of things. Communists are purged from the CIO. You've got the Smith Act, where socialist politicians are actually prosecuted. You've got McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and this continues on. You've got then the blossoming of this kind of radicalism of the new left, but pretty quickly thereafter, there is very serious red-baiting all the way through, this red-baiting within the universities. And lots of Marxists lose their jobs in university. And so what happens is that this new radical theory from Europe arrives, which is a reaction, for example, from the pen of Foucault. I mean, Foucault is a member of the French Communist Party for a while, but in the '50s, the French Communist Party was hegemonic among intellectuals, and it didn't always have good ideas, and it had a kind of bureaucratized culture, and there's plenty about that project to critique. And so Foucault is a part of a generation of left intellectuals who become increasingly anti-communist while promoting new kinds of radicalism. And so that's what Foucault is taken up for in the US and others, right? And so as a vacuum is created by the continued red-baiting and blacklisting of professors, my father was one of these people. He was Yale educated, PhD, and was treated very well, until, in the '60s, his students started radicalizing him, and he became a radical and a Marxist, and thereafter, found it very, very hard to get and keep jobs. A lot of Marxists had this experience.

Chris Hedges

And let me just interject there that you're talking about, Michael Parenti, your father, who has also written several great books, but Ellen Schrecker has done, if you want to read about the history of how brutal these purges were, right down to the high school level. Where the FBI would show up at a high school with a list and no questions asked, no evidence, suddenly, not only did all of those teachers lose their jobs, but they couldn't get hired anywhere else. So that's a moment in America that's extremely important. And Ellen Schrecker wrote two good books, "No Ivory Tower," and "[Many Are] the Crimes," I think is the name of the other one, but she's chronicled that history, and I didn't know how pervasive that blacklisting was until I read those books.

Christian Parenti

Yeah, so that creates an atmosphere of hostility and a vacuum, and then into it come these enticing new ideas about how, well, there's a different kind of revolution and radicalism that focuses on the micropolitics of resistance and the politics of identity, etc, etc. And part of the critique that makes this post-structuralist wave so appealing is that, Foucault's argument is that Marxism is this incredibly powerful theory, and it's essentially the height of the Enlightenment in western metaphysics. And it, nonetheless, in the hands of the Soviet state, produces, helps produce the gulags, right? So the problem is making any kind of sweeping truth claims, and so you have to push back against that and kind of shatter epistemology and knowledge into smaller pieces. And this became very useful and very appealing to academics because it was a way of being radical, a way of being subversive, and also a way of speaking to real problems. There really is racism, there really is sexism, right? Disabled people really are mistreated and shunned, right? So you can talk about real problems and be radical and propose radical transformations without confronting the class hierarchy of the society, which is where the power really lies. It's not that these other issues aren't important. They are, but it's like, in most cases, the solutions to those problems require the redistribution of resources, which only comes when the ruling class, the capitalist class, the owning class, are confronted, right? And so post-structuralism allows academics to pursue a kind of left politics that minimizes, in some cases is even openly hostile to a class analysis and to class struggle, you know? I mean, so what a lot of the story comes down to detaching class struggle from cultural struggles. And what woke is, is the continuation of all of the goals of the Enlightenment left, but in the realm of culture war, in the realm of cultural struggles, and that material conflict is increasingly elided and erased.

Chris Hedges

And isn't it done through the twin evils of relativism and subjectivity?

Christian Parenti

Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I would call them evils. I mean, because, you know... But those are the methods, for sure. It's like, the question becomes subjectivity, and a kind of moral relativism is introduced, which is at first glance, it's about undermining the the bigoted ideologies that had dominated in the West, and say, well, no, it's like there's all sorts of different ways of being. And homosexuality is not a mental illness, right? And everyone deserves full civil rights, right? So there's some important work that's done by relativism. Say, well, just because your worldview is such that you think this is a sin doesn't mean you're right. You just have a point of view, and there are all sorts of other points of view. So I think there's something useful in that, but it is deployed to undermine the Marxist-socialist tradition say, well, it's reductive. It's this meta theory and it's essentialist, and we want to explode things and be more playful than that. And in terms of the subjectivity, yes, that's huge. And another part of that, kind of what goes with subjectivity is the therapeutic turn. And that's something that's in the second part of the essay, right? You have at the end of World War II, most psychologists, psychiatrists, work in institutions, but there's a massive deinstitutionalization of the profession prior to the deinstitutionalization of the patients, that happens in [inaudible] days. But there's a deinstitutionalization of psychology and post war psychology turns away from just dealing with crippling mental illness, and it starts trying to heal regular people and find pathology everywhere, and there's an explosion of this stuff, and you see it taking on a rather maligned form, unfortunately, in the new left. This is the second half of this essay, which is not published yet, but you get the rise of these like politicized therapy groups. There's one I've written about elsewhere, called "reevaluation counseling," which comes out of this guy, Harvey Jackins, who was one of the founders, actually, of Scientology. He was sued by L. Ron Hubbard for stealing a lot of Hubbard's ideas. And reevaluation counseling is still very big on the left, it's associated from 1971 onward, increasingly, with the Movement for a New Society, which is a group [that] comes out of sort of like Quaker movements. And they advocate collective living. And they're very, very involved, the Movement for a New Society is very, very involved in the anti-nuke struggles and the Central American solidarity struggles, and then the anti-globalization struggles, and then they expand. But their influence is still there in this kind of anti-communist, but very radical, quasi-anarchists, but detached from the traditional anarchist theories, and they're all also very influenced by Gene Sharp, who is one of the best known components of revolutionary non-violence. But unlike King and Gandhi, he's secular. He doesn't have a religious cosmology and morality driving him. His approach to revolutionary non-violence is very technocratic, and he actually spends the first 30 years of his career at a Defense Department funded think tank. He is not necessarily directly funded by the Defense Department, but this think tank at Harvard called the Center for International Affairs. When he arrives there, Henry Kissinger is one of the co-directors and the U.S. defense establishment uses Sharp's ideas to basically build out the color revolution toolkit, right? So those same kinds of ideas are increasingly permeating the new left. Reevaluation counseling is just one example of this stuff, these encounter groups like the radical Women's Liberation Movement in the late '60s. Again, these encounter groups and Cesar Chavez famously gets wrapped up with one of these kinds of like, basically cults, Synanon. So subjectivity becomes a battleground for the left, and from the '60s on, it's seen that individual subjectivity is in many ways, the path forward for larger social change. You could argue that it's the other way around. That people's subjectivity changes when the structures they're embedded in change. I mean, of course, it's a bit of both. Anyway, that whole psychological turn within the society and then within the New Left is a very important part of the origins of woke.

Chris Hedges

There's a small point, but I think an important one. And you talk about the avoidance that causes left intellectuals to brag openly about not reading their political enemies is itself an expression of woke, secular religiosity. The right is haram, do not touch it, lest you, too, become unclean. So there's all sorts of figures who I don't necessarily agree with. Karl Popper, I have huge issues with Reinhold Niebuhr, and yet these intellectuals deeply have informed my own understanding of the world around me, although ideologically, I'm not always in tune with them. And I think that, essentially by bifurcating the world into those who are acceptable and those who are not, it is anti-intellectual, intellectually stunting. It stunts us.

Christian Parenti

Yes, and anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism are deeply linked. One saw this during Covid, right? There was zero discussion of any dissent from the official line around any of these measures, lockdowns, the use of experimental vaccines. Mandates firing people who didn't want to take these vaccines. There was no discussion on the left about this. Go back and search the pages of Jacobin. Search the pages of Catalyst, in which this article appears. Search any left journalist pages. There was no critical discussion about any of that. And in fact, that facilitated what I consider to be intensely authoritarian and destructive policies, right? That's just one example of how anti-intellectualism facilitates authoritarianism. If you're not allowed to think, if you're not allowed to read certain authors and let your mind wander, you're going to end up in a very sterile, repetitive cul de sac. And I think that, frankly, I think that's where a lot of the left is at these days, that it is cutting itself off for more interesting ideas. And it's one of the ways that the right has gotten a kind of cultural upward hand on the left by, perhaps cynically, but entertaining ideas. And people are, all people, I think, are intellectually hungry. They might not seem intellectually hungry, I'm not saying that everybody wants to read esoteric theory, no. But people have ideas about stuff. People have ideas about reality. I mean, the number of people in this country who are interested in things is enormous, right? And if the left is just offering a set of kind of, "just so" stories and prefabricated pat answers, it becomes intellectually boring and people will turn away. So that's another problem with all this stuff that in shutting down and policing thought and policing speech and policing thought and turning away from the unclean authors and ideas, the left is painting itself into a corner.

Chris Hedges

You write that millennials, which I think is true, are kind of shaking off a lot of this woke culture.

Christian Parenti

Yeah, I definitely see that. Probably, you know, because for them, it's the establishment. It's not edgy. It's the guidance counselors and the principles that are pushing the trans club, right? Nothing against trans rights, right? I support all of that. But don't be surprised if there's a backlash when that becomes the official ideology, and everyone is supposed to just like accept the preconceived arguments of that lobby, essentially. And so yeah, you get younger people who are turning away from that. Unfortunately, sometimes, into some pretty destructive directions, but also, I think they're just getting over this stuff. And there was certainly a blossoming of a kind of socialist politics in the last 20 years, and a revivification of Marxism. I mean my generation, Gen X scholars, when we got hammered by this post-structuralist moment and the anti-communism, anti-Marxism, that was central to that stuff. And so you learned, perhaps even without knowing it, that you were not supposed to get too into those ideas, you can sort of assume their existence and utility, and you don't want to dig into that too much. I mean, I was explicitly told such things by a British socialist criminologist, Ian Taylor. Great guy, passed away, but he said he once, I think it's important you don't identify as a Marxist. And he had identified as a Marxist for the first half of his career, but he was telling me this in the mid '90s, and he was saying, it's like because you're not going to get a job if you do that, they're going to red-bait you. He didn't say that part, but that was implicit, right? But the younger folks have have thrown that off, and we got... for not being critical in relation to Covid. You know, Jacobin is a great example of this, of a kind of young millennial and Zoomers who are digging into the fundamental class questions and all of the literatures that have accumulated over the last 150 years that help the class struggle and the politics of class struggle.

Chris Hedges

Well, because this generation's hammered, economically. They have been completely betrayed by the system.

Christian Parenti

Yep, a friend of mine out west who was in DSA when it was blossoming, I asked him, so what's like, why are all these people into DSA? He recounted how they were in some meaning, like everybody went around and told the story of what happened to their families in the 2008 crash. And a lot of these people, like 70% of people in the room, like, yeah, you know, my parents, like, got divorced because we lost the house. Or it was just like, you know, stories of real suffering among middle class people. But there was this, like, economic trauma. I think that's actually the key rupture that helps explain the revival of socialist politics and kind of Marxist thinking. Not that that socialist politics and that Marxist thinking always has everything right, no. Not that it's just complete in of itself, no. But it is absolutely important to focus our intellectual efforts and our political organizing on the core class questions about who produces wealth, how and for whom, you know? And to think about ourselves in relationship to those material questions, because the vast majority of us make our living by selling our labor, and the way life is going to improve is if everybody comes together and struggles for what they all need in common, against the few, the increasing few, who are hoarding more and more, and in the process, in fact, creating bubbles and crashes that damage all of us and even freak out some of those owners of capital.

Chris Hedges

Well, we haven't seen an oligarchy. I mean, you know, figures like Bezos, are they worth $180 billion? I mean, you probably have to go back to Pharaonic Egypt to find this kind of disparity and then a system that they have distorted to essentially impoverish the rest of us and funnel wealth upwards, and that makes you ask the right questions. Yeah. Great. That was Christian Parenti, a professor at John Jay College, and we were discussing his article "The Cargo Cult of Woke." I want to thank Diego [Ramos] and Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at Chrisedges.substack.com

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Guilty

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C J Hopkins

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So, the Berlin Appellate Court overturned my acquittal today. I am now, officially, at least according to the New Normal German authorities, a “hate-speech” criminal. I’m officially a “hate-speech” criminal because I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany, and I challenged the official Covid narrative, and I used the cover art of my book to do it.

The New Normal German authorities didn’t like that, and were determined to punish me for doing that, and to make an example of me, in order to discourage other people from doing that. It took them two tries, but they pulled it off. The judge in my original trial screwed up and acquitted me, but the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s office didn’t give up. They appealed the verdict — yes, they can do that in Germany — and this morning the Appellate Court overturned the verdict and declared me guilty.

I’ll report on all the ugly details of my day in court in a proper column sometime later this week, when I’ve sufficiently recovered from the hangover I am currently about to start working on.

I’ll also be resurrecting my legal defense fund and telling you about that in my next column, because the only recourse my attorney and I have left at this point is to try to get the German Constitutional Court (i.e., Germany’s supreme court) to hear the case.

In the meantime, I wanted to share my Statement to the Appellate Court. Here it is.

Statement to the Berlin Appellate Court, September 30, 2024

Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is CJ Hopkins. I am an award-winning playwright, author, and political satirist. My work is read by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. For over thirty years, I have written and spoken out against fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and so on. Anyone can do an Internet search, find my books, reviews of my plays, my essays, and learn who I am and what my political views are in five minutes.

And yet, I am accused by the German authorities of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. I’m accused of doing this because I posted two Tweets challenging the official Covid narrative and comparing the new, nascent form of totalitarianism it has brought into being — the so-called “New Normal” — to Nazi Germany.

Let me be clear. I did that. In August 2022, as Germany was debating whether to end its Covid mask mandates, I tweeted those two Tweets. I challenged the official Covid narrative. I compared the New Normal to Nazi Germany. I did that with the cover art of one of my books. I did what anyone is allowed to do according to German law. I did what Karl Lauterbach has done. I did what German celebrities like Jessica Berlin have done. I did what major German newspapers and magazines have done.

A few months ago, Stern and Der Spiegel published covers of their magazines featuring swastikas. Der Spiegel’s cover featured exactly the same artistic concept as my book cover and my Tweets. The only difference is, the swastika on Der Spiegel’s cover is behind a German flag, whereas the swastika on my book cover and in my Tweets is behind a medical mask. That’s it. That is the only difference.

Stern and Der Spiegel displayed swastikas on their covers in order to warn the public of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism, and that is precisely what I did. I compared the New Normal — i.e., the new nascent form of totalitarianism that came into being in 2020 -- to Nazi Germany. Stern and Der Spiegel compared the AfD to Nazi Germany. That is the only difference.

I’m not a fan of the AfD. I’m not a fan of Stern and Der Spiegel. That doesn’t matter. Stern and Der Spiegel have the right to do what they did, and so do I. That right is guaranteed to us in the German constitution. We all have the right, if we see a new form of totalitarianism taking shape, to oppose it, and to compare it to historical forms of totalitarianism, including Nazi Germany.

I don’t follow German electoral politics very closely, so I don’t know exactly what the AfD has done that prompted Stern and Der Spiegel to compare them to the Nazis. But I know exactly what the German authorities did during 2020 to 2023.

In 2020, the German authorities declared a national state of emergency, for which they provided no concrete evidence, and suspended constitutional rights. Nazi Germany also did that, in March 1933. From 2020 to 2022, the German authorities forced people to wear symbols of their conformity to the official ideology and perform humiliating public-loyalty rituals. The Nazis also did that. The current German authorities banned protests against their arbitrary decrees. With the help of the media, they bombarded the German masses with lies and propaganda designed to terrorize the public into unquestioning obedience. They segregated society according to who was and wasn’t conforming to official ideology. They censored political dissent. They stripped people of their jobs because they refused to conform to official ideology and follow senseless orders. The German authorities fomented mass hatred of a “scapegoat” class of people. They demonized and persecuted critics of the government’s decrees. They dispatched police to beat them and arrest them. They have instrumentalized the law to punish political dissidents. Nazi Germany also did all these things, as have most other totalitarian systems. I documented all this in my book. I spoke out against it. I published essays about it. I tweeted about it.

My punishment for that has been … well, here I am, on trial in criminal court for the second time. The German authorities had my Tweets censored. They reported me to the Federal Criminal Police Office. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. The German authorities investigated me. They prosecuted me. They put me on trial for tweeting. After I was acquitted, that wasn’t enough, so they have put me on trial again. They defamed me. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in legal fees to defend myself against these clearly ridiculous charges. And today, I, and my lawyer, and all the people in the gallery, have been subjected to this official show of force and treated like potential terrorists.

Why, rational people might ask, have I been subjected to this special treatment, while Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Tageszeitung, and many others who have also tweeted swastikas, have not?

This is not a mystery. Everyone knows the answer to this question.

You are not fooling anyone. Everyone understands exactly what this prosecution actually is. Every journalist that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this prosecution actually is. It has nothing to do with punishing people who disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing political dissent, and intimidating critics into silence. I’m not here because I put a swastika on my book cover. I am here because I put it behind a “Covid” mask. I am here because I dared to criticize the German authorities. I am here because I refused to shut up and follow orders.

At my first trial, I appealed to the judge to stop this game and follow the law. She did that. She needed to publicly insult me, and then put on a “Covid” mask to display her allegiance to the “New Normal,” but she acquitted me. She followed the law. And I thanked her. But I will not appeal to this Court. I’m tired of this game. If this Court wanted to follow the law, I wouldn’t be here today. The Court would have dismissed the Prosecution’s ridiculous arguments in its motion to overturn the verdict. You didn’t do that. So I’m not going to appeal to this Court for justice. Or expect justice.

Go ahead. Do whatever you feel you need to do to me. Fine me. Send me to prison. Bankrupt me. Whatever. I will not pretend that I am guilty of anything to make your punishment stop. I will not lie for you. I will not obey you because you threaten me, because you have the power to hurt me.

You have that power. I get it. Everyone gets it. The German authorities have the power to punish those who criticize them, who expose their hypocrisy, their lies. We all get the message. But that is not how things work in democratic societies. That is how things work in totalitarian systems.

I will not cooperate with that. I refuse to live that way.

As long as the German authorities continue to claim that Germany is a democratic country, which respects the rule of law and democratic principles, I will continue to behave like that is what it is. I will not be bullied. I will insist on my constitutional rights. I will continue to respect democratic principles and fight to preserve them. The German authorities can make a mockery of those rights and the rule of law and democratic principles if they want. I will not. Not for the Berlin Prosecutor. Not for this Court. Not for the German authorities. Not for anyone.

Totalitarianism, authoritarianism, tyranny, never win. Not in the long run. History teaches us that. And it is history that will judge us all in the end.

— CJ Hopkins

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The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II

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Bruce Lerro

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The Collective Creativity of Workers: From Unconscious Sleeping Giant to Builder of Barricades Part II

Orientation

Summing up Part I
My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from the other workers. But then I show how romantic theories of art get in the way of seeing creativity as also a collective process rooted in history. I discuss the creative process of the artist, but then close by following Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in demanding that an artist’s whole life should be a work of art.

What’s ahead?
We are now ready to discuss creativity at the macro level of workers. Like sleeping giants for the last 5,000 years workers have been unconsciously shaping and reshaping society. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.But then with the rise of caste and class societies, collective creativity in labor became unconscious and alienated. The magical rituals of egalitarian societies that united all the arts in the service of magic is undermined. What happens is:

But then I describe how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary situations where workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers councils. Ultimately, in communist society all the arts will be joined again in communist magical activity which will include the merger of the sciences and the arts in the service of communist planning, the development of high technology which allows us to do more and more with less and less. Unlike in tribal societies where creativity was mostly collective, in communist societies creativity will be conscious at both the individual and group level.

Creativity as Collective Activity
Labor as human species activity
In order to earn a living in our environment and solve problems the human species has to work. Work involves collective-creative cooperation in the process of deciding on a means of subsistence, making and using tools, harnessing energy, dividing up the work and sharing the resources if successful. Labor is the totality of collective human energy, both physical and mental, which is expended on reproducing society, hence reproducing human beings. It is creativity beyond how an individual lives their life. The problem is that this is unconscious collective-creativity.

Co-creation of the socio-sphere
Labor creates and sustains human society. Over tens of thousands of years the activity of working and using up resources over generations has introduced creative changes onto the surface and depths of Earth. This socio-sphere is like a film, a social membrane which has also developed over generations. The socio-sphere overlays and interacts with the biosphere. The earth is our collective canvas that we have been painting for the last 100,000 years. We are thus self-transforming beings. By the practical transformation of the world through working we find ourselves changed, we find ourselves in a new world, a world of our own making, a world which invites us to satisfy new needs, desires and powers.
Let me briefly review:

this socio-sphere is the collective canvas of humanity, but so far we have been painting behind our own backs, as if sleepwalking.

From society to history

Human social institutions are shaped and in turn shape the biosphere, but as society changes over time, it can no longer simply be understood as an extension of biological evolution. The “aging” process of society becomes human history which developed its own processes and laws that are not reducible to the biosphere. History-shaping includes periods when particular means of subsistence were dominant—hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, industry. These ways of life come into being as creative strategies to ward off population pressure and a resource depletion crisis.

Human practice
History is the story, the ongoing saga, the odyssey of the marriage of society’s actions and consequences upon the rest of nature over time. This is called human practice, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, and contains these ingredients:

collective endeavors which are unconscious but which have consequences which accumulate behind our backs. For example the long-term effects of shabby health-care, education and housing on the productivity of a society.

The historical unconscious
It is this last dynamic that we can speak of as the historical unconscious. This is a result of a series of collective actions which slip beyond our attention span and over which we lose control. The collective sleep walk is our everyday work-life. We become unaware of the effect of our collective actions or inactions upon the production of history. We are like painters who are too close to the canvas to see what we are doing.

There are social institutions which produce a kind of collective defense mechanisms – ideologies. These go with the suppression of this historical unconscious. This is where history is presented as something other than the collective creative activity of the average individual working and breeding. Either taken together or taken separately, here are some examples:

history is exclusively about the past.

In the first case, behind the institutions and the upper class and upper-middle class elites who embody these institutions are the countless laboring actions which provide the food and other necessities that provide those classes with what they need to govern. Without the work of the lower classes, these institutions would cease to function. The second proposition assumes that only vivid and unusual events created by extraordinary men make up history. Everyday events and the average person who makes them stand outside of history. The third proposition ignores that history is always being made in the past, present and future. It ignores the possibility that groups can intervene in history by using what is known about the past to change the future. In fact, we cannot shape history. We either shape it consciously or it is shaped unconsciously.

Creativity as matters of scale
Summing up: creativity can be expressed as matters of scale as:

the collective creativity of history shaping of the entire human species.

The Alienation of Collective Creative Activity in Class Societies

So how did it come to be that the collective creativity of humanity, labor in shaping history and the lives of individuals were not connected to creativity and the only activity associated with creativity was the arts?

Egalitarian hunting and gathering societies and participatory magic
In egalitarian hunting-gathering and in simple horticultural societies, collective-creativity – labor – was collective and conscious. People decided together what the means of subsistence was, what the division of labor would be, how long they would work, what tools they would fashion and how the fruits of their labor would be distributed.

At the same time, before going out to hunt, gather plants or cultivate them preparation was needed. Magical rituals were undertaken to increase the chances of success. Most, if not all the activities which we now associate with art including mask-making, drawing, music, dance and theatre were once magical rituals. In the beginning both arts and crafts were in the service of magic, and magic was in the service of transforming the world.

Chiefdoms and pristine states
As hunting-gathering societies and simple horticultural societies became more complex commodity production emerged. Alongside arts and crafts in the service of ritual, we now have arts and crafts as secular activities in the service of commodity production. With the emergence of state civilizations 5,000 years ago, there is a split between conscious and unconscious creativity. Conscious creativity is channeled into three social arenas.

artistically in that a class of artists and artisans emerge who produce profane objects not only for public sale, but objects which for ideological support, as for example, monumental architecture for the ruling class. A second group of objects is in the service of conspicuous consumption by the ruling class.

Fall of magic and the rise of religion
With the fall of magic and the rise of monotheism, art ceases to be a collective-creative activity and becomes the act of isolated and rarefied individuals who prostitute themselves to religious authorities. Art becomes a wandering ghost, with a methodology but without an ontology.

Capitalist Societies
At the same time, the work of the lower classes becomes alienated, more or less mechanized and unconscious. In other words, the work itself contributes to the creative reproduction of society. But because the lower classes do not participate in the design and implementation of social policy, because they do not reap the full fruits of their labor (most of it is given over to the ruling class and its minions) their part of the creative contribution to society appears alien. The lower classes become unconscious of the full weight of what they produce. They merely perceive their work as something that reproduces their own life and the life of their family, rather than for the whole of society.

Making History Collectively Consciously
There is a kind of collective creativity which surfaces periodically in our society and sometimes sustains itself alongside the social unconscious. These activities are harbingers of what collective creative activity might look like in a post class society. The first kind is the spontaneous response of groups of people to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and swarming lizards. These collective actions are more or less reactive to circumstances and they dissipate when the catastrophic events have subsided. We will call this “historically conscious” collective creativity. There is another kind of collective-creative activity which is ongoing and designed to change history. This is the collective-creativity of social movements. Marx called this practical critical activity. I will also call this “historically self-conscious creativity”.

People in natural disasters
The following is a description of a personal experience I had with others during a snowstorm. The setting is New York City in the early 1960’s. I am 15 years old. It is the dead of winterin January and about 3:30 in the afternoon. It has been snowing or days. Upon leaving high school I see that the snow drifts have smothered all traffic. Things seem eerily still. In the distance I see something moving. Someone is coming towards me, waving for me to meet him. My fleeting reservation fizzles in the face of the starkness of these extraordinary circumstances. He asks me to help him push his car to the side of the road. As we begin, I notice that we have been joined by two or three others who spontaneously pitch in. When the car is safely pushed to the side of the road, we proceed to help the latest arrivals dig their cars out. More people come along. They suggest we all shovel out the entire street, since then we will all have access to the main road. Since I don’t have a car, this is not relevant to me. Still, I am caught up in the moment and what under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do in the name of individual self-interest, I find myself doing anyway. We organized ourselves into little groups and worked into the night

What is happening here? I am hustling about, shoveling here, pushing there. I have long since forgotten about eating. I feel as if I’m regressing in time, as if I were 8 or 9 years old. My adolescent posturing has wilted and, in its place, seeps an adventurous joy of plotting and scheming with playmates long ago. But this time, instead of “let’s pretend” fantasies, the snow and the storm invite us to actually change reality.

As this street-clearing project takes shape, we relax a little. Strangers are laughing and joking. Grateful neighbors are out in the street. Some offer hot chocolate and a hardy fire to war up by. Someone throws a snowball at me from across the street. A man in a three-piece suit ducks behind a car to avoid retaliation. How bizarre! But then this whole episode suggests something forbidden, not of this world. Time seems to have stopped. Since no traffic is moving, the street is ours to do anything we want with the piled-up snow, from sleigh-riding to castle-building to snowball fights. Kids come out of the houses and begin sleigh riding. Some are carrying ice skates on their way to a frozen pond three blocks away.

Both in process and result, we have created the seeds of a new social life. The labor of clearing the street, digging out cars, chopping ice was a spontaneously organized collective activity, achieved without coercions from authorities nor with the carrot of wage labor as a consolation. But some nameless abdication, we have inherited some hidden recess in the Himalayas.

Sometime around 7:00 pm the snow has stopped. The snow plows are out and traffic has begun to move. People acknowledge their exhaustion and car pool for rides home. But I don’t want this to end! I no longer have a material foundation to house the exuberance I felt that has begun to rapidly dissipate. I felt joy with those people in the wild snow, but the snow has been tamed. What do I do with the joy? Under what social conditions could I feel this way again? Will I ever feel this way again? Rarely have I despised the prospect of “normal life” as much as I did then. It is as if the freshly plowed street was like the sun beating on my face, early in the morning, awakening me from an enchanting dream.

On that twilight winter’s day, social life itself seemed as pliable, as impressionable as a slab of clay or a blank canvas. In our collective actions – shoveling snow, pushing cars, chopping ice – we experienced a creative process similar to what the individual artist lives through from the beginning to the end of a single painting – inspiration, a flurry of activity and finally a new artifact or situation. Our snow shovels were our paints and brushes, and the street, that microscopic chunk of social terrain, was our canvas. Society turned out not to be an impenetrable aggregate of frozen institutions, but a vast network of activities whose future is open-ended.

Under normal circumstances it is hard not to think of social institutions as solids rather than liquids, as nouns rather than verbs, as things rather than processes. Just as a fan revolving at maximum speed does not reveal how the individual rudders are connected or even visible, so too, the macroscopic “social fan” of life under normal times whirls too quickly and over too vast a terrain (an entire country) to display its structural components, the collective creativity of people working to produce the life of social institutions. It is as if the snow storm clogged a small corner of the rudder long enough for its constituent elements to become detectable.

Social movements
The second kind of collective creative activity is more assertive. Instead of reacting to extraordinary circumstances, social movements are on-going rather than sporadic and they are, at least in some cases, dedicated to creating extraordinary social conditions. These movements aspire to actively change the course of history.

Let’s take a very small, simple example. Let’s say a group of neighbors call a meeting to combat the rise of drugs and prostitution in their neighborhood. In order to address the problem, these people must meet more than once if to have a chance of being successful. Phone calls need to be made, petitions drawn up, house to house calls made, flyers designed, meetings with local neighborhood mediators scheduled and a system of vigilance set up. This endeavor involves collective creative activity. Like all creative actions there comes a point where the work they have done is tested by the larger community response including, the surrounding neighborhoods, the dealers, the prostitutes, their Johns and the police.

The reactions of these groups affect the future plans that these neighbors made. Resistance calls for one set of plans while a positive response calls for another. Other neighbors might be indifferent, the police ignore the problem, but a local socialist politician is supportive and willing to work with them. Just as an artist will alter the subject matter of his work, together with the color scheme or medium in response from the public, so too this community of neighbors will develop new plans and theories based on their practice. Social movements can be reformist (as above) or they can be revolutionary. In some cases, social movements seize power and transform the economic and political relations. This is the highest form of historically self-conscious collective-creative activity.

Workers’ councils
Especially in the last 150 years, there erupted a series of attempts to take over social life without capitalists, or without the state. These “workers’ councils” arose out of irreversibly critical situations in the existing order. In some situations, they emerged alongside the state, creating a “dual government”. When the state fell, some workers’ councils spread over a wider terrain. During the Spanish revolution they reached as much as 1/3 of the country. In some cases, they not only governed without the state but in places they abolished the local currency and began their own system of exchange. These experiments took place during revolutionary processes when the official authorities lost power but before their power was regained. The organization of this world and the experiences that participants experienced must have been beyond their wildest dreams. These movements lasted as briefly as 3 days (the Seattle General Strike) or as long as 3 years (the Spanish revolution).

Like most social movements, these councils began by simply reacting to the abuses of the existing order. Workers wanted higher wages, better working conditions, most justice. But once the authorities lost power, these workers found themselves doing far more than they bargained for. Though these workers’ councils were inventive and festive, like all creative activity it was productive and it contained its own collective discipline. In Spain, following the failure of Franco’s coup in 1936, at least one third of the country was self-managed with better productive records than the overthrown government. This was done in the middle of a civil war!

The internal organization of the councils expressed the creativity it was demonstrating in the world. They were organized in an anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic manner. The workshop of the councils, the foundation from which all decisions were made, was the general assembly. Whatever resolutions resulted were carried out by mandated delegates who had no independent power of their own (unlike representatives who, once elected have power to make their own decisions). They merely carried out decisions already made in the assembly. Secondly, these delegates were often rotated so that no one got too comfortable being a permanent authority. Lastly, the delegates were immediately revocable. This means that any abuses of power were grounds for immediate termination. There were little state bureaucratic procedures or the political red tape where population had to wait until the next election.

In both their amazing coherence of their social management capacities and the profound change in the quality of their interactions, these experiments were truly “out of this world”. In fact, the depiction of what happened to the participants runs into the same problems that any mystic or artist or anyone who has had a peak experience has when they try to describe what happened to them. How do you describe an experience which seems almost that it is on another plane of reality than the language of the existing order.

Where did they occur? Workers’ councils have dotted the globe in at least the following countries:

The Paris Commune of 1871
The St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905
The Russian Revolution of 1917
Short-lived experiments in Poland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria between 1917-1920
The Seattle General Strike of 1919
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 (for most of the first year and then on and off until 1939)
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The French General Strike of 1968
The Chilean Revolution 1970-1973

Workers’ councils today exist in hundreds of factories in Argentina and are present in an embryonic form in workers’ cooperatives around the world. Let us look at how the metamorphosis begins.

The Paris Commune: from reacting to collective creativity
In order to envision how these workers councils begin, we will combine the descriptions from the Paris Commune of 1871 with the French General Strike of 1968. The Paris Commune emerged at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. It began as a patriotic movement at odds with its government which it felt was conducting the war in a half-hearted manner. In 1870 while the army was called to the front, the National Guard was called on to defend the fortifications in Paris.

“The war fever that now gripped the city generated a patriotic demand that all citizens be armed. Within a few weeks, there were over 130 new battalions, making a total of some 300,000 Parisians in the National Guard. ‘No one could call himself a citizen’ it was being said “unless he had a rifle’. The cry was for more arms, and the authorities were forced to distribute hundreds of thousands of weapons to those flocking to join the newly formed battalions. (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 21)”

Here we have an armed, but so far merely patriotic population. The change from this to a social revolution began on March 18, 1871:

“Thiers [then the head of the government] sees the armed workers of Paris as his main obstacle to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Bismarck {head of Prussia]. He decides to send ‘loyal battalions to remove the cannons… the operation starts successfully in the early hours of the morning…but the operation has been bureaucratically and inefficiently planned. The necessary gun carriages don’t arrive to remove the captured guns. The crowd begins to grow. Women, children, old people mingle with the troops…Some …start talking to the guard. When General Lecomte, losing his head, orders his troops to fire, it is already too late. The soldiers refuse to fire, turn their rifle butts up…soldiers and civilians have fraternized…the soldiers who have deserted their regiments shouted to them to surrender, but they stayed in the saddle, and continued to spur their horses on furiously…’cut the traces’…The crowd let out a great cheer…the women closest to the cannons, to which they had been clinging to for half an hour took the knives that the men passed down to them from hand to hand…the maneuver was carried out amid joyful laughter and cheering. The artillerymen were carried off by their mounts and found themselves cut off from the guns and surrounded by groups of people inviting them to fraternize. They were offered flasks of wine and meat rolls… They were soon won over to the side of the rebels. The cannon had been retaken. . (Steward Edwards The Communards of Paris, 1871. 63)

National Guard barricade during the Paris Commune, May 1871

Adolphe Thiers, head of the Counter-Revolution

Two points are worth mentioning. First, revolutions begin when situations get desperate enough to where formerly indifferent or hostile groups recognize they have more in common with other groups than they had first suspected. In this case the soldiers, who were supposed to be loyal to their commanding officers. But in reality, most soldiers are working class. They have more in common with the people in the streets than with their officers. When a critical mass of soldiers refuses to follow orders, it undermines and limits what loyal soldiers can do. From the disarming of these solders the next logical step is the building of the barricades. For a portrayal of this we turn to the French general strike of 1968.

Thiers' suppression of the Commune. A Paris street, May 1871.

“Here with the help of cars, billboards, railings, torn off branches, trees, as well as cobblestones, the first serious barricades went up…(Singer, Daniel Prelude to Revolution, 127) anything could serve the purpose… a neighboring building site was a real treasure. The most precious find there was an air hammer, which, once mastered made it possible to open up the streets wholesale. The paving stones then went from hand to hand…people were coming down with sandwiches, drinks, chocolate.” (139-140)

Whereas yesterday social life appeared as this alienated series of exchanges out of the control of most everyone, for days, weeks, months and even years in some places, these alienated institutions revealed their true nature as malleable institutions dependent on the continued alienated activity of workers for their very life. When social life stops their true origin in labor reveals itself. When social life resumes without these institutions people begin to grasp how superfluous capitalists and the state really are to social production and reproduction.

Seattle, 1919
The Seattle strike of 1919 was different than other strikes. The ship workers did not simply shut everything down and limit themselves to a set of demands. They used the strike as a stepping stone for starting things up under their own management. Additionally, the strikers organized themselves to provide essential services in areas not under the direct control of the strikers, such as taking care of hospital laundry, getting milk to babies, and collecting wet garbage. They didn’t stop at controlling their own factories or buildings. They related to the entire city as if it was theirs. Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued, in expanding the terrain of their management they gradually learned how the city is run:

“The strikers were at once brought face to face, with the way in which the whole community, including their own families, is intrinsically tied together… if life was not to be made unbearable for the strikers themselves. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 280)

Here are some of the achievements of the milk wagon drivers who

“…established through their own organization thirty-five neighborhood milk stations all over the city…The stations were announced as open from nine to two., but the milk was always gone before noon. The amount handled increased as the days went on until about 3,000 gallons were handled in various stations. The first day the supply ran noticeably short…but by the third day…the irregularities were ironed out and the supply was more adjusted to the need. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 254-255)”

The most intense and complex re-organization fell to the provision trades, charged with feeding the strikers:

“Some 21 eating places were opened in various parts of the city. The food was cooked in large kitchens…and then transported to various halls where it was served cafeteria style …(R and B, 256-257)…Locations had to be found, numbers of diners estimated, food purchased, equipment borrowed or bought, transportation problems solved. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 127).

The resolution of these problems depended upon an improvised community of people who probably barely knew each other, without the benefit of any pre-existing organization and in open hostility to all established authority. There were delays in the opening day of this “feeding depot” for many reasons:

“…there was no corps of dishwashers to keep up the meager supply of dishes until the waitresses union, assisted by patrons, leaped into the breach…By the second day however, the difficulties were much reduced and meals began to appear with regularity. (R and B 256-257)…By the last day of the strike, 30,000 meals a day were served without a hitch. (Robert Friedheim The Seattle General Strike, 128).

In summary,

Commonalities between natural disasters, social movements, workers’ councils and artistry
Both kinds of history shaping – reactions to natural disasters and consciously planned as in social movements – require the spirit of the arts and those who make them. Art, like all forms of creativity has its feet in both worlds. On one hand, it is an expression of what is possible. On the other hand it reproduces and justifies the old world. But the highest form of art does not represent reality, or even make pictures of the world to come. Artists must supersede art itself and use artistic talents in the planning, together with others, the world to be built. Henry Miller sensed something like this when he wrote:

“One has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant, it merely points the way…All art will one day disappear…and life itself will… definitely and for all time usurp the field… (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, 162)”

History of Conscious and Unconscious Creativity
I would like to close by summarizing the place of creativity in the human species, both at the individual and collective levels, at the micro world of individual development and the macro world of history.

Bio-social, historical foundations
First, creativity in general was a survival strategy that human beings use in competition with other species for resources. Second, we built an envelope around the earth, a “socio-sphere” first locally then regionally, then nationally and finally globally. Third, there is the building up of a thickening crush of human history as human societies change over time.

Creative and conscious creativity in egalitarian societies
There is conscious collective creativity involved in the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of goods. There is also conscious collective creativity involved in magical rituals for hunting and planting societies and these magical activities include all the arts, including mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, singing and dancing.

Unconscious creativity in caste and class societies
This appears in the alienated labor of peasants and workers in Bronze Age, Iron Age civilizations as well as feudal societies and industrial capitalist and socialist societies.

Conscious creativity in caste and class societies
This exists In the economic and political design and implementation of social policies by elites—priests, priestesses, aristocrats and merchants. Secondly, in the religious construction of myths and rituals by priestly castes. Third, in the religious projection of creativity out of humanity in the forms of the activity and characteristics of gods and goddesses in the work of priest and priestesses. Further, there is a sacred and secular realm in individual creativity of men and women in the arts and crafts which serves the ruling classes as conspicuous consumption. Lastly, as we have seen, there is conscious creativity in the work of those involved in survival during natural disasters and in social movements.

Conscious creativity in communist societies
The first stop is what people do in revolutionary situations. The description of the activities in workers’ councils is an example. From there, maximum collective creative activity lies in the political and economic decision about the production and circulation of goods and services by a dialectical exchange between the local and regional workers councils on the one hand and the centralized socialist state on the other. This happens first locally regionally and internationally. The same process occurs when the human species sets up civilizations in outer space. In addition, there are collectivist myths and rituals for socialists which draws from the rich traditions of Neopaganism. In the process women and men re-own their alienated labor and become goddesses and gods themselves. On the individual level there are not visionary arts in the service of socialism

Conclusion: Healing the Split Between Conscious and Unconscious Collective Creative Activity
As I’ve shown in the last section, collective responses to natural disasters and the building of social movements are examples of attempts to make collective creativity conscious. In the case of social movements, through what Marx called “practical-critical activity”. In the case of workers’ councils, examples include conscious creativity in the service of building dual power proto-communist organizations.

Conscious collective creative activity under communism
Collective creativity would express itself in the design and implementation of political and economic organization and no longer be determined by aristocrats, capitalists or state bureaucrats. Secondly, whatever myths and rituals remained in society would be co-created by everyone, not by a priestly caste. Thirdly, humanity would re-own the projection of its creations as the work of gods and goddesses and simply recognize that humanity creates itself over time and across space through laboring. Lastly, while there would be arts and artists who would pursue their work on an individual basis, the arts would be freed from the service of the ruling class either as ideology or for conspicuous consumption. The arts would no longer be for elites. On a collective level, the arts would return to their magical roots, not as superstition but in the form of visions of the world being born through mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, dancing, theater and writing for a socialist future.

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