Fortunately, I don’t believe that it is. The simple fact is, Supreme Court rulings to the contrary notwithstanding, organizations have no rights because they are not people. One will search the Constitution in vain to find evidence to the contrary. The problem is, the interpretation of the Constitution has been left in the hands of nine people whose logic is so consistently warped that they are incapable of parsing simple sentences. This does not evince a flaw in the Constitution, since interpreting the Constitution is a right that the Supreme Court arrogated to itself. The idea that corporations deserve to be treated as immortal persons is not by a long shot the most absurd judgement to be passed down by the Supreme Court. In the past, they have also decided:

It is unsurprising that an unelected, appointed-for-life body of men would work so diligently to undermine the foundations of our free society (incidentally, it is also unsurprising that the power of the executive has consistently expanded over the past 200 years when the people that interpret the boundaries of the executive are appointed by him). It is a testament to the durability of American democracy that the United States remains the freest country in the world despite the efforts of these usurpers.

I can say this and at the same time state emphatically that I do not “hate America.” I have no quarrel with America. It’s the American government whose policies I take issue with. Ask any leftist and he’ll probably tell you the same thing. Those who dismiss people who disagree with the foreign policy of the US government on moral grounds as “America haters” thereby reveal their ignorance.

The most powerful state in the world, whose military expenditures equal the rest of the world combined, should be expected to behave in a militaristic, imperialistic fashion. It’s just common sense. You can defend it on Machiavellian grounds, but you have to at least accept the underlying reality. That the American state is “imperialistic” and “war-mongering” should be obvious enough to be a truism. Unfortunately, we can rely upon the American media to shield the public from this crucial fact.

Take, for example, the Vietnam War. To this day, the media, when it considers the moral ramifications of that war, considers it to have been a “blundering effort to do good.” Notice that in the context of the American media, this is a tautology. It was an effort to do good because the glorious American government did it. What actually transpired in Indochina is irrelevant. In fact, the leaders of South Vietnam were self-professed fascists, nearly half of the crops of South Vietnam were deliberately destroyed by the American government, a fifth of the population died under the blows of a greater tonnage of bombs than what the Allies dropped on all theaters during World War II, and the survivors were herded into concentration camps to “protect” them from the Viet-Cong, a South Vietnamese organization that, while certainly guilty of its own share of crimes, enjoyed the support of the majority of the population. It should be a truism in the United States that JFK, LBJ, and Nixon were some of the worst mass murderers of their day. They may not top the list, but they’re on it. Of course, you can, as many people who are forced to accept the truth do, that mass murder is not in fact necessarily reprehensible, and that you have to consider a cost-benefit analysis of the situation. You would be insane, a fanatic devotee who, once forced to see the moral ramifications of his beloved State’s actions, evades the issue entirely by arguing that moral standards do not apply to state actors, but you could make an argument. Honestly, I don’t care either way. What’s important is that people accept the basic reality.

Of course, it isn’t accepted. The incredible regimentation of thought necessary for the American public, to a man, to believe in the nobility of their government’s foreign policy, should be expected in only totalitarian states. It is a tribute to the propaganda value of a highly centralized mass media that this is possible even in a liberal democracy. It works not because the people are stupid. It works because the lie is so huge, and so often repeated, that the majority of the public have no choice but to accept it as fact. When people are illiterate, they are easy to dupe. It becomes a far more formidable task when they are intelligent and discerning, as they are now. A mass media, concentrated into a very few hands, is required to manufacture an alternate reality for the masses that is acceptable to the powers-that-be. The genius of this alternate reality is that it is a complete inverse of the actual reality, and so the people who know the actual reality are assumed to be completely insane.

Take the Iraq War, for instance. The actual reality was precisely the opposite of the reported reality: not only were there no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but there was not even any credible evidence that there were. Notice what happened when it became clear to everyone that this was the case: in one of the most spectacular examples of doublethink in modern history, the government was no longer fighting to uncover weapons of mass destruction; it was fighting for democracy in Iraq! This, incidentally, was also a chimaera, as the Bush and later the Obama administrations deliberately sabotaged the democratic process in Iraq in order to suit their own agendas. By the way, a majority of the public still believes that there was a link between Iraq and 9/11. When the media does such a piss-poor job of informing the public of the basic facts, it must be considered that perhaps the basic facts are unimportant to them, and that what really matters to them is subservience to power.

In 1984, Big Brother’s propaganda apparatus hinged on ensuring that there is no discernible reality outside of the claims of the party. The modern world resembles its Orwellian counterpart more than we would like to admit.

Contrary to popular delusions, government is not instituted to benefit the people. It is instituted solely for the purpose of accruing power. A cursory glance at the history of the human race reveals that the one constant throughout all governments is their capacity for violence, and that democracy is merely a concession given when the government loses its ability to coerce the people through violence. The idea that a properly functioning democracy entails an informed electorate voting for people who will represent their interests is an illusion; a better vision of a properly functioning democracy is a government perpetually at war with its own people, and losing.

Governments do not yield their power to oppress lightly. They do not give into popular demands gracefully. Governments must be beaten and humiliated before they conform to the popular will. Marxists are only half right when they say that the prime struggle in all of human history is the class struggle; it is more succinct to say that the prime struggle in human history is the struggle between ordinary people and their government, and those that their government privileges above them.

Sometimes this struggle manifests itself in open rebellion. Such conflicts should not be entered into lightly, however, and as always violence should be used only as a last resort. More often however, it manifests itself in relatively peaceful ways; protests, strikes, plebiscites, etc. What is important, if we care about democracy, is that the government be perpetually forced to submit to the popular will.

A public healthcare program enjoys the support of 60% of the population. Whether or not you agree with that 60%, it is a democratic axiom that the will of the majority of the people must be at least considered feasible. Yet it is dismissed in Congress as “politically impossible.” Instead, they offer a healthcare bill that a majority of the public opposes. This is true only because the government is not sufficiently responsive to the will of the people. Healthcare is a topic which the Left dominates, yet they squander this advantage by falsely assuming that the government gives a damn what the people think. They lose themselves in meaningless promises of “hope” and “change” and think that maybe with this president everything will be all right. Then they act surprised when Obama continues all of the Bush-era policies that they thought he had promised to stop. To be fair, it is not entirely their fault. Obama had virtually unlimited propaganda resources at his disposal (alternatively referred to as “campaign funds”). When a lie is big enough, people are prone to believe it.

But hopefully, the disillusionment that has followed Obama’s campaign can serve a useful purpose. Perhaps only the shock of total, humiliating defeat, on healthcare, torture, and a thousand other issues can shake people on the left back to their senses, and make them realize that government is, and always has been, their adversary.

While the political beliefs of newspaper owners and editors are clearly articulated on opinion pages, their views are not supposed to infiltrate the reporting of news. The analysis presented in this paper raises questions about this claim….[we] find that information on news pages is slanted in favor of the candidates endorsed on the newspaper’s editorial pages.

The only thing that is truly astounding here is that there was apparently ever any doubt among serious academics. It’s a question that is sufficiently answered with a resounding “duh.” Such is the nature of professional, for-profit journalism. Which, incidentally, is why it is a regressive model for the dissemination of news and why it has no earthly right to exist.

Newspapers used to be essentially “town meetings on paper.” Far from public debate being managed and controlled by professional journalists and their corporate sponsors, any citizen of a town was free to submit an essay expressing his beliefs to his local paper. This is a far healthier method of distributing information and it is one we would do well to return to in some form. It is inherently propagandistic for the public debate to be managed by a class of professional elites. In more honest times, this was a simple fact that was barely concealed; eminent “progressive” journalist Walter Lippmann believed it was the duty of journalists to “engineer consent,” so that none would be trampled by the ignorant, bleating masses who are too stupid to think for themselves.

At the highest levels of journalism, dishonesty and conceit of truly demonic proportions are the name of the game. Again, keeping to the “liberal” end of the spectrum, Thomas Friedman, who was instrumental in procuring support for Bush’s war in Iraq by scaring the public into believing that their safety was at stake, quietly conceded shortly after the invasion on the Charlie Rose show that there probably were no weapons of mass destruction, and that his real reason for supporting the war was because it was a chance to tell Arabs to, and I quote, “suck on this.” Such sadism would be the subject of scorn and derision in a media environment guided by minimal standards of decency, but Thomas Friedman remains one of the most eminent and respected journalists in the industry.

It should be self-evident, but we are so used to it that we scarcely even notice it, that as long as public discourse is controlled by a professionalized class of journalists, that public discourse will be inherently propagandistic in nature. If we are to remain secure in our liberty, it is paramount that we be able to effectively exercise that liberty via a free and open press, “free” meaning the press, taken in aggregate, be a true expression of the popular will and not of a specific class of persons, and “open” meaning that anyone be allowed to contribute, regardless of background or experience. In effect, public debate must be considered communally owned property, not something left to people who we hope know better.

The esteem in which Thomas Paine, the most radical of our founding fathers, held John Adams and John Jay is particularly instructive. In an open letter to George Washington, Paine wrote:

“John [Adams] has said, that as Mr. Washington had no child, the Presidency should be made hereditary in the family of Lund Washington. John might then have counted upon some sinecure himself, and a provision for his descendants. He did not go so far as to say, also, that the Vice-Presidency should be hereditary in the family of John Adams. He prudently left that to stand on the ground that one good turn deserves another.”

“…John Jay has said that the Senate should have been appointed for life. He would then have been sure of never wanting a lucrative appointment for himself, and have had no fears about impeachment. These are the disguised traitors that call themselves Federalists.”

The simple fact is that many of our founding fathers could hardly be thought of as liberal democrats, that the aristocratic sensibilities that permeated pre-revolutionary America survived the Revolution in one form or another, and that the real driving forces behind American radicalism of the period were not the rich landowners that we so admire today, but the yeoman farmers and the citizens of cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.

It should be noted that this was well known at the time, although it is practically buried today under a mountain of praise for the founders. A few selections from the Anti-federalist papers bear this out:

“Those furious zealots who are for cramming [the Constitution] down the throats of the people, without allowing them either time or opportunity to scan or weigh it in the balance of their understandings, bear the same marks in their features as those who have been long wishing to erect an aristocracy in THIS COMMONWEALTH [of Massachusetts]. Their menacing cry is for a RIGID government, it matters little to them of what kind, provided it answers THAT description…I had rather be a free citizen of the small republic of Massachusetts, than an oppressed subject of the great American empire.”

“We the Aristocratic party of the United States, lamenting the many inconveniences to which the late confederation subjected the well-born, the better kind of people, bringing them down to the level of the rabble-and holding in utter detestation that frontispiece to every bill of rights, “that all men are born equal”-beg leave (for the purpose of drawing a line between such as we think were ordained to govern, and such as were made to bear the weight of government without having any share in its administration) to submit to our Friends in the first class for their inspection, the following defense of our monarchical, aristocratical democracy. As a majority of all societies consist of men who (though totally incapable of thinking or acting in governmental matters) are more readily led than driven, we have thought meet to indulge them in something like a democracy in the new constitution, which part we have designated by the popular name of the House of Representatives. But to guard against every possible danger from this lower house, we have subjected every bill they bring forward, to the double negative of our upper house and president. Nor have we allowed the populace the right to elect their representatives annually . . . lest this body should be too much under the influence and control of their constituents, and thereby prove the “weatherboard of our grand edifice, to show the shiftings of every fashionable gale,”-for we have not yet to learn that little else is wanting to aristocratize the most democratical representative than to make him somewhat independent of his political creators. We have taken away that rotation of appointment which has so long perplexed us-that grand engine of popular influence. Every man is eligible into our government from time to time for life.”

The paper from which this last quote is excerpted I think is particularly significant, for it underscores the degree to which the government of the United States was originally meant to be a guided democracy, the only popularly elected section of the government being the House, and its ability to legislate being severely circumscribed. As an aside, we should also remember that the original Roman senate was primarily an aristocratic body meant to curtail the democratic effects of the lower legislative assemblies which actually wrote Roman law.

Thomas Paine, although he was a Federalist, understood this quite well. His proposal for the American legislature in Common Sense suggested that the legislature consist of 390 delegates, or not less than thirty per state, reasoning that a high proportion of delegates to electorate would ensure that the popular will would be properly expressed (The first United States Congress sat with 80 legislators). He also abhorred the thought of a singular executive; as he wrote in his letter to Washington, “A plurality is far better: It combines the mass of a nation better together: And besides this, it is necessary to the manly mind of a republic that it loses the debasing idea of obeying an individual.”

It is also important to recognize, as it was at the time, that the office of president is in actuality a king, albeit an elected one with constitutionally circumscribed powers. But it is important to recognize that neither of these things were unusual in the history of European monarchy. Benjamin Franklin and other Founders wrote candidly about the “natural inclination” of men towards “kingly government.” But this has all been buried by apologists who seek to rewrite into American history a heavenly aura surrounding the Founders.

The disappointing truth is, the Founding Fathers were fairly liberal for rich aristocrats, but decidedly illiberal by the standards we profess to hold them to today.

First I would have to work out an objective standard against which I could measure any prospective answer. For example, in the literature from the period, how often does the machine’s association with immigrant groups come up? I would also have to discover the extent to which political machines dealt with native-born Americans. I am fairly certain that political machines tended to prey upon recent arrivals from Europe but I’m not entirely sure. I might also want to discover whether or not the popular conception of the machine blamed the immigrant for supporting it, or more so the boss for actually participating in the corruption. I also wonder to what extent if any the middle and upper classes felt (obviously falsely) shut out from the political process by the machine and its reliance on poor, underprivileged groups. Or was the infrastructure of the machine itself financed by economic elites? To what extent did the machine empower underprivileged groups, and to what extent did it perpetuate their powerlessness?

These are just a few questions which might shed some light on the matter.

Genovese begins Materialism and Idealism in the History of Negro Slavery in the Americas by praising “a new and welcome development” in the study of American slavery: historians of the period are finally, as of the 1960s, beginning to write about American slavery from a “hemispheric perspective,” or in other words, comparing the American slave system to slave systems in other parts of the Americas. The body of the essay itself is a critical review of Marvin Harris’ Patterns of Race in the Americas, which in itself is a critique of Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis arguing for a hemispheric perspective on slavery; according to Genovese, however, Harris implicitly accepts the core of Tannenbaum’s argument. Having put that question aside in the second paragraph, Genovese is then free to express his own thoughts on the matter.

According to Genovese, the weakness in Tannenbaum’s argument “is that it ignores the material foundations of each particular slave society, especially the class relations, for an almost exclusive concern with tradition and cultural continuity.” In other words, Tannenbaum’s “great weakness” is that he is not a Marxist. This is noteworthy because in most of Genovese’s writings on Marxism there is an ever present concern with a dogmatism which in his view hurts Marxism as a philosophy. Yet here he is essentially claiming that a fellow historian’s view of history is imperfect insofar as it lacks a Marxist perspective. Genovese himself offers a perfectly understandable explanation for this in an earlier essay, On Being a Socialist and an Historian: “[Socialists] are terribly smug people: We really do believe that our political movement represents the hope of humanity and the cause of the exploited and oppressed of the world.” To be concerned with social justice is therefore virtually inseparable from being a socialist, in his view. You cannot truly be concerned for the exploited and oppressed unless you are also a socialist. This dogmatism seeps into Negro Slavery in the Americas in his complaint that Tannenbaum cannot truly understand the origins and character of class exploitation unless he considers it from a Marxist perspective. From an ideological perspective, therefore, Genovese is his own worst enemy.

But I digress. Genovese goes on to say that Tannenbaum’s “concern with tradition and cultural continuity” implies “the necessary victory of the inheritance over contrary tendencies arising from immediate material conditions. Thus, Harris can label his viewpoint idealist and insist, as a materialist, that material conditions determine social relations and necessarily prevail over countertendencies in the historical tradition.” The last sentence is worth reiterating because it defines the terms, namely idealism and materialism, which are essential for understanding anything in this essay. Genovese continues: “Unfortunately, his materialism…soon reveals itself as a sophisticated variant of economic determinism. It is, in short, ahistorical.” Economic determinism is the view, related closely to materialism, that economics largely define the social relations in society. This view Genovese vehemently rejects as an historian because it pays little attention to an historical perspective.

I’ll finish this later, but post what I have for now.

Two basic conceptions of socialism have predominated since its inception. The first conception predominates among the intellectual elites, and holds that the state, unaccountable to the people, must manage society for the good of the people, who are too stupid to make decisions for themselves. This conception of socialism has been especially pronounced since the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the subsequent destruction of whatever democratic thought had once existed in socialist circles, so that shortly before the midpoint of the 20th century George Orwell regarded with horror Stalinists in England who considered democracy to be a “bourgeois illusion.”

The second conception of socialism is that as practiced by the Western working classes, who are obviously not so “stupid” as to endorse the former, elitist brand of socialism. This conception of socialism seeks to democratize all aspects of life, most importantly the economic sphere, and to bring an end to all forms of economic exploitation. This was the animating philosophy behind the democratic revolutions in Europe. These socialists diverge sharply from one another as to how this vision of economic justice is to be achieved; some of them advocate a strong role for the democratic state in the socialist project, while others advocate a stateless society of freely associated individuals. But they all agree on one thing: The supremacy of democracy to all other forms of social organization.

The former conception of socialism is rightly denounced worldwide as morally bankrupt and an intellectual fraud, while the latter can be accused, perhaps rightly, as a utopian dream; but among decent people it cannot be regarded with the same mixture of horror and disgust that is rightly accorded the Bolshevik view of socialism. But again, what interests me is not so much the ideas themselves so much as the movements that they spawned. From Russia to Spain, Germany and France, what socialism inspired was a movement for direct democracy on a scale never before seen in the history of civilization. Factories were to be appropriated by workers and managed by elected representatives; all potential sources of inequality, such as land ownership and in some cases even money, were to be abolished. Typically, even the government was to be abolished and replaced by a federative system of elected workers’ and citizens’ councils. That these audacious social experiments ultimately bore little fruit need not detain us; what is important is that people were driven to find and extinguish, once and for all, the roots of human suffering. And any ideology which spawns such a movement cannot be all bad.

Consequently, the economic history of the last 40 years should be troubling to most Americans. “By 1974,” Chomsky notes in World Orders Old and New, “the United States had eliminated all capital controls.” “The breakdown of regulatory structures and the huge increase in unregulated capital have had a large-scale impact on the international economy,” he continues, “[John] Eatwell notes the striking fact that ‘in 1974, just before the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, about 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions were for the finance of trade and long-term investment, and only about 10 percent were speculative. Today those percentages are reversed, with well over 90 percent of all transactions being speculative.’” The results, he says, are that “National economic planning is increasingly difficult even for the rich, market instability is increasing, and governments are driven to deflationary policies to preserve market ‘credibility,’ driving economies ‘towards a low-growth, high unemployment equilibrium,’ with declining real wages and increasing poverty and inequality…Note that the mobility of capital and immobility of labor reverses the basic conditions of classical economic theory, which derived its conclusions about the benefits of comparative advantage and free trade from the assumption that capital is relatively immobile and labor highly mobile.”

The threat of capital flight has political ramifications as well. Concentrations of highly mobile capital form a “virtual senate,” able to effectively veto government policy with the threat of capital flight. For this reason, during its meteoric economic rise to power, South Korea made capital flight punishable by death. Incidentally, a pure market economy, unfettered by government regulations or planning at a national level, is sure to cause an increase in human suffering in the long term, for reasons that Richard A. Couto and Catherine S. Guthrie describe in Making Democracy Work Better: “An economy based on seizing the comparative advantage in every instance, such as a profit-maximizing capital market, avoids run down costs. In so doing, the market leaves people in communities to meet the costs of the run down factor and the social capital deficits on their own. This is true immediately of the communities left behind by capital relocation and eventually of those communities where capital relocates.” In short, firms seek only to reduce costs to themselves, without regard to the systemic costs that they create.

And that is about all for today.

In the late nineteenth century this was a dominant strain of socialism in the United States and the platform of the Socialist Party of America. Very little ink is dedicated to this or other leftist parties which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in American history textbooks, but it is, in my opinion, a worthy topic of study. At its peak, the Socialist party was able to place two men in Congress and accrue 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election. The city of Milwaukee even routinely elected socialists to public office until the 1940s. The Socialist Party’s four-time presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, was arguably the most important labor organizer and public dissident of the period.

Yet if one were to crack open an American history textbook today one would see little more than a blurb or two about Eugene Debs and virtually nothing about the Socialist Party nor much about the Farmer-Labor Party, the Populist Party, or the Social Democratic Party, which collectively formed a populist convulsion which could have, but didn’t, result in the creation of a third American political party. In fact, this entire period tends to be covered as quickly and as haphazardly as possible, presumably because of the embarrassment that careful study of this crucial chapter in American history would cause. But because I feed off of ennui, and also because it speaks to the character of American political culture, I will provide the reader with a brief history of the Socialist Party of America and its relationship with organized labor.

The American Railway Union (ARU) was founded in 1893 in Chicago with Eugene Debs, a locomotive fireman, at its head. A year later, the union became embroiled in the great Pullman Strike, during which 250,000 railroad workers across the United States refused to handle trains with Pullman cars in response to the Pullman Company’s decision to slash its workers’ wages. While cutting wages between 30% and 70%, the company maintained prior costs of rent and goods in its company town of Pullman, Illinois. The strike lasted two months, until the Pullman company decided to hitch Pullman cars to US postal cars, prompting president Grover Cleveland to send in federal troops to prevent workers’ obstruction of the US postal service. The ARU’s ringleader, Eugene Debs, was arrested on charges of ignoring a federal injunction ordering the rail workers back to work, and in a case that reached the Supreme Court it was decided unanimously that the federal government had the authority to authorize such an injunction, and Debs was sentenced to six months in prison. Debs, who was not a socialist at the time, began reading the works of Karl Marx while in prison. Upon his release from prison Debs helped found the Social Democratic Party of America in 1897 and later the Socialist Party of America in 1901. The SPA managed to elect many of its members to positions in local and state governments, and at its height was represented in the United States Congress by Meyer London and Victor Berger.

The SPA had a very rocky relationship with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Leftist and liberal thought in America has traditionally had a libertarian slant since the days of Jefferson, and as such the AFL, adopting a general policy of anti-statism, was wary of entering into any political alliance with anyone, most of all the statist Socialist Party. The AFL instead preferred a strategy of “rewarding friends and punishing enemies,” throwing their weight behind individual candidates but always stopping short of entering into the sort of intimate arrangement that British unions had with the Labour Party. During the 1924 presidential election, the AFL reaffirmed their policy in an official explanation of their backing of independent candidate Robert LaFollette:

We do not accept government as the solution of the problems of life. Major problems of life and labor must be dealt with by voluntary groups and organizations of which trade unions are an essential and integral part.

Nonetheless, the SPA continued to enjoy modest popularity among rank-and-file members of the AFL, especially among the Jewish and German immigrants which constituted its base. The Socialist Party, for its part, considered the AFL to be “antiquated,” and generally favored the more radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, also founded with help from Eugene Debs. Eventually even the Socialist Party itself split between the moderate social democrats and the more radical revolutionary wing of the party. This petty factionalism has always and continues to plague the American left.

The leaders of the Socialist Party were heavily repressed during World War I under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-1918; Victor Berger was twice denied his seat in Congress for violating the Espionage Act by speaking out against the war, and Debs himself was imprisoned for ten years and disenfranchised for life. In Debs v. United States, the Supreme Court again decided against Debs, and upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act. Charles Schenck, secretary of the Socialist Party, after Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he did not have the right to free speech against the draft in the famed Schenck v. United States case, was sent to prison for six months. In sum, the First Red Scare was not so much a moral panic as the name implies as it was a massive, deliberate attack upon free speech directed against leftist politicians and activists. The Socialist party survived the First Red Scare and lived on until the early 70s, but it would never recapture the vitality that it had at the turn of the century.