I offer this discussion between two of my favourite political economists, Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai, for two reasons. First, its specifics flow seamlessly from my last three posts, all written in the context of America’s mid term elections four days ago – hence also of America’s overt war on Iran, and proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.
Second, because Michael and Radhika use those specifics to ask a wider question. Unless we take Western democracy at face value – in which case I’ve a bridge to sell you – how did class rule manage to survive and prosper despite the 20th century arrival, in the West and much of the global south, of universal suffrage?
I personally like the audio-visual ‘flavour’ of a good podcast but not everyone has an hour to spare, not even on a Sunday. If that’s you, given that most of us can read faster than listen, try this Naked Capitalism version. It provides a better transcript – “ums, ahs and you knows” stripped out – than the unedited auto-generations on YouTube.
Faster still is my three minute summary on how the rentier elites who rule the West aren’t much troubled by the trappings of democracy. Following the order given by Michael, here’s why:
Upper and lower chambers
Britain’s House of Lords and America’s unrepresentative Senate are the two best known examples of upper chambers through which the ‘will of the people’ may be thwarted or at least delayed. In Britain’s case the king, who in extremis has the power to dismiss his government – with his armed forces pledged to back him in the event of resistance – provides an additional safeguard for class rule. Liberal defenders of the status quo see these mechanisms of last resort as quaintly anachronistic pageantry. Then again liberals, their brains addled by idealist – as in non materialist – understandings of history, rarely exhibit a sound grasp of realpolitik.
Constitutional and legal checks
Written constitutions and supreme courts do not fall from the sky but arise from specific material and political conditions. America’s constitution, for example, was written by slave owners (the worst of their genocides on native peoples yet to arrive) concerned with protecting property rights while France’s constitution codified the (progressive) gains of a bourgeois revolution which synchronised her transition from feudalism to capitalism. In my country a judiciary sold as proudly independent of the executive and legislative arms of state – even on matters vital to power – performs similar services for class rule in the absence of a written constitution.
Media answerable to wealth and power …
… not just by patterns of ownership but, as argued in Britain decides, by the advertising model. Chomsky:
Media are large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations. Now the question is: what pictures of the world would a rational person expect from this set up?
What of media not reliant on advertising, hence notionally free of its market disciplinary effect? One, the BBC relies on income streams set by politicians who themselves fear the editorial fulminations of Citizen Kane. Two, its upper echelons are disproportionately Eton/Oxbridge. In Chomsky’s much cited 1996 interview by the Beeb’s Andrew Marr, the latter objects that he does not self-censor. To which his guest replies:
I don’t say you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I am saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair. 1
Governments answerable to wealth and power
Are we to suppose it mere coincidence that Yvette Cooper – the British Home Secretary who took the extraordinary and quite unprecedented step of placing the non violent direct action group, Palestine Action, on its list of terrorist organisations – also receives funding from Labour Friends of Israel?
Not that the Israel lobby is the only game in town:
People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that.
Brian Berletic podcast [edited]
It’s a good thing that, as shown in the US mid terms last week, Americans have woken up to push back at AIPAC funding. 2 But will they – we – draw the more general lessons that corporate capture of governments goes wider than the Israel Lobby, and that the corruption of ‘democracy’ is not confined to the USA? Call me a glass half empty kind of guy but I doubt it. See the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
*
The mechanisms cited above subvert democracy within the borders of more or less sovereign nations. But ours is an imperialised world, defined by the export from global north to south of monopoly capital; south to north repatriation of profits. Under these conditions, two additional subversions apply.
IMF/World Bank imposition of Wall Street will
To cut short a huge and immensely important story – too long and intricate to do justice here – I mean the debt bail-outs made conditional on ‘market reforms’ through which neoliberal policies are applied to the detriment of entire peoples and to the gain of the creditor elites who rule the West.
Washington/Wall Street capture of populations
See my post, Road to WW3: information space. By diverse soft power mechanisms, notably but not exclusively ‘colour revolutions’ led from the shadows by organisations like National Endowment for Democracy, Washington has repeatedly shown its capacity to oust governments perceived as obstacles to its global hegemony, and install more pliant, US-groomed alternatives.
While Road to WW3: information space focuses on imperialised nations as defined three paragraphs up, the extent to which the leaders of the collective West – Europe, Australia and Canada in particular – subordinate the interests of their peoples and economies to those of Washington and Wall Street is the subject of another post in that series, Road to WW3: capturing minds.
No one has done more to alert us to the capture of information space, and betrayals by comprador leaders, than Brian Berletic. In his recent posts on how the EC has, with US help, subverted the socially conservative government of Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia – using the now familiar playbook of a seemingly spontaneous and progressive movement, in this case the Student List – Brian makes clear he is no more supporting Vučić than he is the duped progressives. Rather, he is using a wealth of evidence to show what’s going on and cui bono. This vital point, in a minefield of smoke, mirrors and false oppositions, is echoed in the featured discussion when Radhika reminds her guest (and us) that neither the ‘liberals’ who still hold office across most of the West, nor the right wing ‘populists’ who make a big play of challenging their corruption and sly tyrannies, can be supported by those of us still in the fight for a better world.
There’s much else to say, not least Michael’s remarks – substance of his recent works on The collapse of Antiquity and Destiny of Civilization – to Radhika on how the creditor oligarchies which for some fifty years have both defined the West and driven its many and severe ailments came into being.
But this too I must place under my burgeoning file of stuff for another day.
* * *
- Media are not confined to corporate news and opinion. The soft propaganda of arts and entertainment also do service for class rule. As do the frequently nuanced power-serving functions of ideology which present – the ruling ideas of any age being those of its ruling class – as simply common sense, even as they lead inexorably to Armageddon, ecocide or merely destitution. And as with the subliminal messaging of commercial propaganda (the wall to wall advertising by which mendacity is so normalised its moral corrosions are no more visible to us than the air we breathe) we are the more susceptible for deeming ourselves immune.
- AIPAC is already beginning to use arms length channels while attacking candidates it sees as hostile to Israel on other ostensible grounds.