Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  “So,” Offer went on, “everyone gets what he or she deserves, either for his or her effort or for his or her property. No one asks how he or she got this property. And if they don’t have it, they probably don’t deserve it. The point about just-world theory is not that it dispenses justice, but that it provides a warrant for inflicting pain.”

  Offer, a transplanted Israeli who came to Oxford after serving as a soldier in the 1967 war, said that the effectiveness of an ideology is measured by the amount of coercion it takes to keep a ruling elite in power. Reality, when it does not conform to the reigning ideology, he said, has to be “forcibly aligned.” The amount of coercion needed to make society adhere to the model is “a rough measure of the model’s validity.”

  “That the Soviet Union had to use so much coercion undermined the credibility of communism as a model of reality,” he said. “It is perhaps symptomatic that the USA, a society that elevates freedom to the highest position among its values, is also the one that has one of the very largest penal systems in the world relative to its population. It also inflicts violence all over the world. It tolerates a great deal of gun violence, and a health service that excludes large numbers of people.”

  As larger and larger segments of society are forced because of declining economies to become outsiders, the use of coercion, under our current model, will probably become more widespread.

  “There are two core doctrines in economics,” Offer said. “One is individual self-interest. The other is the invisible hand, the idea that the pursuit of individual self-interest aggregates or builds up for the good of society as a whole. This is a logical proposition that has never been proven. If we take the centrality of self-interest in economics, then it is not clear on what basis economics should be promoting the public good. This is not a norm that is part of economics itself; in fact, economics tells us the opposite. Economics tells us that everything anyone says should be motivated by strategic self-interest. And when economists use the word ‘strategic,’ they mean cheating.”

  Offer argued that “a silent revolution” took place in economics in the 1970s. That was a time when “economists discovered opportunism—a polite term for cheating,” he said. “Before that, economics had been a just-world defense of the status quo. But when the status quo became the welfare state, suddenly economics became all about cheating. Game theory was about cheating. Public-choice theory was about cheating. Asymmetric information was about cheating. The invisible-hand doctrine tells us there is only one outcome, and that outcome is the best. But once you enter a world of cheating, there is no longer one outcome. It is what economists call ‘multiple equilibria,’ which means there is not a deterministic outcome. The outcome depends on how successful the cheating is. And one of the consequences of this is that economists are not in a strong position to tell society what to do.”

  The problem, he said, is that the old norms of economics continue to inform our policies, as if the cheating norm had never been introduced.

  “Let’s take the doctrine of optimal taxation,” he said. “If you assume a world of perfect competition, where every person gets their marginal products, then you can deduce a tax distribution where high progressive taxation is inefficient. This doctrine has been one of the drivers to reduce progressive taxation. But looking at the historical record, this has not been accompanied by any great surge in productivity; rather, it has produced a great surge in inequality. So once again, there is a gap between what the model tells us should happen and what actually happens. In this case, the model works, but only in the model—only if all the assumptions are satisfied. Reality is more complicated.”

  Offer brought up one of the issues to consider: “When those in authority, whether political, academic, or civic, are expounding their doctrines through Enlightenment idioms … we must ask, is this being done in good faith? And here I think the genuine insight provided by the economics of opportunism is that we cannot assume it is being done in good faith.”

  According to Offer, “economics, political science, and even philosophy, ever since rational choice swept through the American social sciences, have embraced the idea that an individual has no responsibility towards anyone except himself or herself. A responsibility to anyone else is optional. The public discourse, for this reason, has become a hall of mirrors.”

  Our current economic model, he said, will be of little use to us in an age of ecological deterioration and growing scarcities. Energy shortages, global warming, population increases, and increasing scarceness of water and food will create an urgent need for new models of distribution. Our two options, he said, will be “hanging together or falling apart.” Offer argues that we cannot be certain that growth will continue. If standards of living stagnate or decline, he said, we must consider other models for the economy.

  Offer, who studied the rationing systems set up in the countries that took part in World War I, suggested that we examine how past societies coped successfully with scarcity. He held up these war economies, with their heavy rationing, as a possible model for collective action in a contracting economy. In an age of scarcity, it will be imperative to set up new, more egalitarian models of distribution. Clinging to the old neoclassical model, he argued, could erode and perhaps destroy social cohesion and require the state to engage in greater forms of coercion.

  “What you had [in World War I] was a very sudden transition to a serious scarcity economy that was underpinned by the necessity for sharing,” he said. “Ordinary people were required to sacrifice their lives. They needed some guarantee for those they left at home. These war economies were relatively egalitarian. These economics were based on the safety net principle. If continued growth in the medium run is not feasible, and that is a contingency we need to think about, then these rationing societies provide quite a successful model. On the Allied side, people did not starve, society held together.”

  Adam Smith, he noted, “wrote that what drives us is not, in the end, individual selfishness but reciprocal obligation. We care about other people’s good opinions. This generates a reciprocal cycle. Reciprocity is not altruistic. That part of the economic core doctrine is preserved. But if we depend on other people for our self-worth, then we are not truly self-sufficient. We depend on the sympathy of others for our own well-being. Therefore, obligation to others means that we do not always seek to maximize economic advantage. Intrinsic motivations, such as obligation, compassion, and public spirit, crowd out financial ones. This model can also motivate a different type of political and economic aspiration.”

  However, if we cling to our current economic model—which Offer labels “every man for himself”—then, he said, “it will require serious repression.”

  He concluded: “There is not a free market solution to a peaceful decline.”

  The revolutionary theorists of the past invested tremendous energy in looking for the triggers of revolt, although nearly all were caught off guard by the eruption of the revolutions they championed and organized. Lenin said in January 1917, six weeks before the revolution that would bring him to power: “We of the older generation may not see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” It is impossible, as Lenin discovered, to “predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes, it moves irresistibly.”20

  “The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing,” the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin said.

  After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested—rulers, lawyers, clerics—have carefully enwound her. She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious, political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences. But the inveterate enemies of thought—the government, the law
giver, and the priest—soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.21

  Lenin placed his faith in a violent uprising, in a professional, disciplined revolutionary vanguard freed from moral constraints, and (like Marx) in the inevitable emergence of the workers’ state. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon insisted that gradual change would be accomplished as enlightened workers took over production and educated and converted the rest of the proletariat. Mikhail Bakunin predicted the catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist order—something we are likely to witness in our lifetimes—and new autonomous worker federations rising up out of the chaos. Kropotkin, like Proudhon, believed in an evolutionary process that would hammer out the new society.22

  Emma Goldman, along with Kropotkin, came to be very wary of both the efficacy of violence and the revolutionary potential of the masses. “The mass,” Goldman wrote bitterly, echoing Marx, “clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify!”23

  The revolutionists of history counted on a mobilized base of enlightened industrial workers or common laborers. The building blocks of revolt, they believed, relied on the tool of the general strike—the ability of workers to cripple the mechanisms of production. Strikes could be sustained with the support of political parties, strike funds, and union halls. Workers without these support mechanisms had to replicate the infrastructure of parties and unions if they wanted to put prolonged pressure on the bosses and the state. But today, with the decimation of the US manufacturing base and the dismantling of our unions and opposition parties, we will have to search for different instruments of rebellion, as Lynne Stewart correctly observed.

  Our family farms have been destroyed by agro-businesses, and most manufacturing jobs have disappeared as our manufacturing base has moved overseas; of those that remain, fewer than 12 percent are unionized.24 Unlike past revolutionary struggles in industrial societies, we cannot rely today on the industrial or agrarian muscle of workers. The dispossessed working poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students and unemployed journalists, artists, lawyers, and teachers, will form our movement, while workers in Asia and the global south—where our manufacturing is now located—will have to organize and fight the industrialists through the traditional tactics of strikes, work stoppages, and unionizing. The fight for a higher minimum wage is crucial to uniting service workers with the alienated college-educated sons and daughters of the old middle class in the United States. Bakunin would have recognized these pivotal déclassé intellectuals in the Occupy movement.

  Once they unite, those who have had their expectations dashed and concluded that they will not be able to rise economically and socially will become our triggers of revolt. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of service workers and fast-food workers. It is also part of the consciousness of the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of debt.

  Many of the urban poor have been crippled and broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards, and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers—our “internal colonies,” as Malcolm X called them—mobilization will be difficult. Many African Americans, especially the urban poor, are in prison, on probation, or living under some kind of legal restraint. Charges can be stacked against them, and they have little hope for redress in the courts, especially as 97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. A New York Times editorial recently said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas, which often include waiving the right to appeal to a higher court, is “closer to coercion” than to bargaining.25

  Poor people of color are subject to daily abuse by omnipotent police forces. Police are permitted to strip them of their most basic rights and are either authorized to use deadly force or protected by their departments and the legal system in most cases when they do, even against unarmed suspects. The law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argues that we have created a criminal “caste system.” This caste system controls the lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated but the 4.8 million people on probation or parole.26 Millions more people are forced into “permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education, and public assistance difficult or impossible.27

  A Department of Defense program known as “1033,” begun in the 1990s and authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, and federal homeland security grants to the states have provided a total of $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either for free or on permanent loan, the magazine Mother Jones reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting police departments with heavy machine guns, magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft, and armored vehicles, has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into quasi-military forces of occupation. “Police conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early ’80s,” writes Hanqing Chen, the magazine’s reporter. The American Civil Liberties Union, cited in the article, found that “almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.’ The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately against people of color.”28

  The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us.

  Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examine 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their 2008 article “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” They conclude that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Nonviolent movements appeal to those employed within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And, the authors point out, with as little as 3.5 percent of the population who are organized and disciplined, it is possible to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

  While governments “easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime,” Stephan and Chenoweth write. “Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.”29

  The ability to draw those within the systems of power into the movement creates paralysis and crippling divisions within the ruling elite. And this is fundamental to all successful revolts. “Internally, members of a regime—including civil servants, security forces, and members of the judiciary—are more likely to shift loyalty toward nonviolent opposition groups than toward violent opposition groups,” they write.

  The coercive power of any resistance campaign is enhanced by its tendency to prompt disobedience and defections by members of the opponent’s security forces, who are more likely to consider the negative political and personal consequences of using repressive violence against unarmed demonstrators than against armed insurgents. Divisions are more likely to result among erstwhile regime supporters, who are not as prepared to deal with mass civil resistance as they are with armed insurgents. Regime repression can also backfire through increased public mobilization. Actively involving a relatively larger number of people in the nonviolent campaign may bring greater and more sustained pressure to bear on the target, whereas the public may eschew violent insurgen
cies because of physical or moral barriers.30

  Although it appears, as I write this book, that political ferment is dormant in the United States, this is incorrect. Revolutions, when they erupt, are to the wider public sudden and unexpected, because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is, as Berkman observed, invisible. Revolutions expose their face only after revolutionary ferment has largely been completed.

  Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to begin by discrediting the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and constructing alternative ideas and language. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, once the old vocabulary no longer holds currency, the power elite is finished, although outwardly it may appear that nothing has changed. But this process is difficult to see and often takes years. Those in power are completely unaware that the shift is taking place. They will speak, like all dying elites, in the old language until they finally become figures of ridicule.

  In the United States today, no person or movement can program the ignition of this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, its abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment and the massive debt peonage31 that is crippling millions of Americans, and the widespread despair and loss of hope, along with the collapse of institutions meant to carry piecemeal and incremental reforms, including the courts, make blowback inevitable.

  “Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”32