Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone. The Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. 2021, Haymarket Books. 388 pages.
“We’ve been had” are the first words on the table of contents, the page right before the first numbered page vii of 401 numbered pages.
“We’ve been had.” They aren’t in your edition; only mine. I wrote them there. The authors were way more eloquent, asking “How do we know what we think we know about the world?”
In this volume, a set of lectures the authors gave to undergrads at the University of Arizona, Chomsky and Waterstone, (one known to me as an iconic socialist, the other off my radar), begin to answer this question and raise so many others, about militarism, capitalism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, the environment and just what constitutes common sense. Plus colonialism, hegemony, empire and just who the hell we think we are. To which the short answer of course is that we are whoever we have been persuaded to be by the powerful, wealthy interests that need our complicity and compliance.
Writes Waterstone: “Unless we train ourselves to be open-minded and skeptical, which is actually what critical thinking and learning are all about, we continue to accept the status quo even when we are disadvantaged by it. We are also diminished in our capacity to imagine alternatives to the taken-for-granted status quo, and we come to accept its inevitability.”
Then in the ensuing chapters, the two lecturers break it all down. All the way down. Including the reality that, despite our long history of oppression and genocide of indigenous and enslaved peoples, international meddling, self-dealing and war crimes, “there has never been a Truth Commission here,” which Chomsky calls “unthinkable, a violation of common sense.” But which seems utterly American, we being people who place low value on national accountability.
This is a course I wish I could take. The lectures are transcribed — they read like lectures — but I imagine there is little comparison to sitting in such a class, experiencing the cynicism, realism, sarcasm and frustration of these great thinkers with such a combined depth and breadth of understanding of American reality.
It is in some ways a survey course — an introduction to Gramsci and Hume, Buchanan and Hayek, Smith, Lippman and Neibuhr, Dewey and Debs, and McNamara and McCarthy, plus Franklin and Johnson, Reagan, some Bushes and Clintons. Folks I knew and didn’t, so many pivotal folks in the underpinnings of our current system. You’ll hear about the Powell Memo (which handed the keys to capitalism), NSC 68 (which exponentially and unnecessarily grew our national “defense”), the damaging work of the World Bank and the IMF, how Communism was our friend until we we didn’t need it anymore. The prison system, the war on drugs, the labor movement, HUAC, ALEC, Central & South America and Vietnam. (Not in that order.) Plus Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard. Among my favorite lines: “If you looked at US currency, it used to say ‘Exchangeable for gold.’ And then it said ‘Exchangeable upon demand.’ Now it just says, ‘In God We Trust.’” Which is to say, I guess, “good luck.” That’s gotta be a metaphor for something.
It is also a course in government, in economics, in global development and how we created a world ruled by corporations. Hegemony is about coercive government —“leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others,” says one or another online dictionary. This work, this course, is about realizing to what degree We the People are the dominated (even while our country is the one doing the world-dominating), and how it has come to be. And “how difficult it is to extricate oneself from the spider’s web.”
The lecturers discuss the role of social institutions, of indoctrination and keeping people in line — especially control of young people — churches, schools, scouting, but also tupperware parties and bridge clubs, bowling leagues and fraternal lodges. The advice of the Powell Memo (in 1971) was that social institutions all be co-opted, “assaulted” by the Chamber of Commerce to become mouthpieces for corporate propaganda. Which absolutely happened.
Many of those social institutions began to lose cachet or relevance, causing some to mourn the loss of “America," or “Christianity,” but causing wise ones to celebrate the loss of the means of social control.
(If you know me, you know I’m not particularly bothered by the church’s fall from social standing. The last thing we need is yet another generation of children indoctrinated by evangelical churches — or even by mainline Protestant ones. We need critical thinkers, and churches aren't very good at that.)
Of course, labor unions were always targets for infiltration: the AFL-CIO, they note, “became one of the instruments of red baiting and witch hunting…” (The Communist unions seemed more resolute about labor, racial and gender justice. See Gilpin et al, here.) Now, once-powerful worker-led unions have become shadows of their former glory, more often seeking simply to stanch losses than win advances, and fighting in the sea of right-to-work laws that provide no such thing.
Churches, though, are still hanging in the balance. There is a battle for the church between nationalism and the vision of the prophets, repeated perhaps in every generation. Chomsky and Waterstone didn’t write that; I am writing it. There are churches that still display the flag, and wave their patriotism on “Scout Sunday,” July 4, Veterans Day, Memorial Day and 9/11, but choose words not to offend on MLK day, and have little of revolutionary value to say on Labor Day — much less May 1 International Labor Day. And now Juneteenth. Can we wonder what terrible things white people may do with that new holiday?
Milton Friedman wrote in 1962:
“Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around… That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available, until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
But it is becoming evident to me, the more I read, the more I pay attention, that the libertarians, neo-liberals and fascists have not been the only ones holding cards they hope for an opportunity to play. Racial justice activists, environmentalists, Socialists, labor agitators, Palestinian allies and others have been organizing for decades. The crises — and they are legion — have come at us fast and furious, and we seem to have reached a point of … something. This is where hope lies.
In the penultimate chapter, Resistance and Response, the lecturers discuss movements and instances of progress. Arab Spring, LGBTQ liberation, Occupy, BLM. There is backlash, to be sure. The Black Panthers, the Vietcong, the Palestinians testify to the backlash, but there is something to be said for stepping into the breach.
“We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scary inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”
Churchill wrote that, in the first draft of a speech he was to give in Parliament before WW I. (He left it out, and it was lost for decades.) Churchill was referring to Britain, of course, but we know it is also the indictment the U.S. must bear.
I couldn’t help thinking that it also indicts the Church. All that we have, all to which we’ve been complicit…
In the final chapter, on page 300, I found the part that seemed to be where I fit: “For social change to occur, the first task that is necessary is to open a space for oppositional critique, not just any critique, but oppositional critique, which relies upon a recognition of the difference between what is and what ought to be, or what might be.”
I thought of the prophets. And all the pastors and preachers I know. I have a pulpit every week to say what I believe matters, to lift up a vision that I didn’t have to invent (because Isaiah and indigenous peoples and Black mothers and refugees and so many others have been saying it for decades, centuries, millennia), to invite conversation, repentance and resistance.
There are days I wonder if preaching is enough, or if it matters at all. That little paragraph way toward the back on page 300 assured me that I have my work to do and it matters quite a lot. There has never been a truth commission here, but I can tell the truth every week. Every Single Week.
It is also imperative that I, that we, know what of we speak. This book is a really good review of where we are and how we got here. The final sentence of the book is the calling: everything depends on the actions that people take into their own hands.
This is a book of stories. American history. Our history. We’ve been had. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Read this book.