Ask people what it means to them “to be an American.” Almost every
answer will be a variation on the theme of freedom, but in the
abstract, as if they each were repeating by rote phrases from a hymn.
"We bless you, Lord, for our conditioning."
American Indoctrination 101: Freedom Is a Fallacy
“Freedom of speech” in the media is a fallacy. The spectrum of
accepted ideas is embarrassingly narrower than it is in most European
countries.
The voices in those media form a small, hermetic, repetitive
and self-preserving elite that has less to do with ideology than a form
of religious belief in the status quo.
Once again blogs have dented the club and forced it to own up
to realities it might not have otherwise, but even the blog world has
developed its own class system, its own establishment, conventions and,
quite rigorously, its own rules of intolerance.
Conformist America
Freedom of speech is pointless when it doesn’t provoke
conversations, when dissent isn’t accepted not only as an inherent
value of the liberal mindset, but as its necessity.
I’m tempted to say that we live in a conformist age. But in
reality most of American history has been one age of conformism after
another, shocked and jagged periodically by brief periods of radical
rethinking, by that shaking of the tree of liberty Thomas Jefferson
spoke about, often with drips of blood as a consequence.
This is not, by any means, one of those periods. Not even close. Dissent over Bush has formed its own establishment.
But a movement to be rid of something as specific as one
presidential administration and its follies isn’t the same as a
movement to change the culture, politically and socially.
There isn’t, among viable Republican or Democratic candidates
running the slightest desire to question the status quo, to, for
example, up-end assumptions about the market economy.
Or to challenge the eminently challengeable belief that
American interests begin and end with its business interests. Fire up
those engines of subversion and see how far your “freedom of speech”
will take you.
False Flag: Virtuous America
The disconnect between the neocons’ Bush-Cheney version of the world and the reality we face is clear enough.
With simple-mindedness that makes George Babbitt seem like a
foreign policy whiz, Bush thinks that American power and institutions
are innate virtues that the world craves, that no people could want
another system.
It’s what drove his assumptions that American tanks in Baghdad
could metamorphose into the making of another San Antonio on the banks
of the Tigris. He got an Alamo in reverse, writ large.
But he had the majority of Americans’ support as late as 2004.
And if he did so, it’s because the disconnect he projected is alive and
well in the heart of most Americans.
They have soured on Bush. Yet they haven’t lost their illusions about 'virtuous' America.
Bush will soon be gone. Not so the fatal assumption that to be an American is to be the world.
And you thought we lived in a free, democratic, classless society? In
fact, we live in a bourgeois democracy, run for and by the bourgeoisie.
Its ideology is Capitalism - the method by which wealth is accumulated
for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.
Democracy serves the interests of the bourgeois class.
Democracy's narrow limits are set by capitalist exploitation. Freedom
in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the
ancient Greek republics: Freedom for the slave-owners.
Bourgeois Society (Capitalism)
Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the
commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread
into every corner of life.
The family and the state still exist, but – the family is
successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a
relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely
expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other.
The state retains its essential instruments of violence, but
more and more comes under the sway of commerical interests, reduced to
acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.
The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, who
own the means of production as Private Property, despite the fact that
the productive forces have become entirely socialised and operate on
the scale of the world market.
The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a
class of people who have nothing to sell but their capacity to work;
since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, workers
have no choice but to offer their labour-power for sale to the
bourgeoisie.
This system of buying and selling labour-power is called wage-labour
and is characteristic of bourgeois society, though it has been around
since the Peasant Revolt of 1381.
The classic form of wage labour is payment for work by the
hour or week. Nowadays many workers work on the basis of contracts and
piece-work but these forms only disguise the underlying relationship,
which remains that of wage-labour.
Money and all forms of credit reach their highest development
in bourgeois society. As a result, life in bourgeois society “happens”
to people in much the same way as the weather happens to people, with
money flowing around apparently according to its own laws.
To put this another way, in bourgeois society there is a “fetishism” of commodities.
Just as tribal peoples believed that their lives were being
determined by trees and animals and natural forces possessing human
powers, in bourgeois society, people's lives are driven by money and
other commodities, whose value is determined by extramundane forces.
Bourgeois Democracy
American politics is a form of government that serves in the interests of the bourgeois class.
The word Democratic is attached to such a government, because in it all people in such a society have certain freedoms:
Those who own the means of production, the bourgeoisie, are
free to buy and sell labor-power and what is produced by it solely for
their own benefit.
Those who own only their own ability to labor, the
proletariat, are free to sell themselves to any bourgeois who will buy
their labor power, for the benefit of maintaining their own survival,
and giving greater strength and power to the bourgeoisie.
The state fundamentally represents the interests of one class
over others. On this basis Lenin named bourgeois democracy bourgeois
dictatorship.
On the same token, Lenin made no distinction that the
socialist state, being a state that represents the working-class, is a
dictatorship of the proletariat.
In no civilized capitalist country does "democracy in general" exist. All that exists is bourgeois democracy.
It is not a question of "dictatorship in general", but of the
dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its
oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome
the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain
their domination.
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