Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  This book could not have been written without the generous support of the Lannan Foundation, the Nation Institute, and the NoVo Foundation, which provided a grant to Truthdig to fund my weekly columns.

  Carl Bromley at Nation Books is one of the finest editors in publishing. He loves books. He astutely edited and shaped this book, as he did my three previous books. He blesses the writers who work with him with his literacy, passion, integrity, and generosity. Daniel LoPreto and Benjamin Pokross, along with Alessandra Bastagli, who replaced Carl Bromley as the editor at Nation Books as I neared completion, invested considerable time on the manuscript. They provided astute and important critiques, editing, and suggestions that greatly improved the book. I appreciate their hard work. Patrick and Andy Lannan, along with Jo Chapman, at the Lannan Foundation have for years provided crucial support. It would be very difficult to do my work without them. Jeannette Quinton and Boris Rorer were instrumental in fact-checking and research. I am very grateful for their meticulous work and friendship. Todd Clayton also worked with his usual rigor and exacting accuracy on the book. He has been a joy to have as part of our family for the last two years as he finished his degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

  I am privileged to work with Robert Scheer, the editor of Truthdig, whose dazzling skill as a writer and editor is matched by his wisdom, boundless generosity, and profound integrity. He is what we all want to become. Zuade Kaufmann, who matches Bob in her commitment to great journalism and commentary and who publishes Truthdig, has been a pillar to all of us who write for the site. I am fortunate to have them and the Truthdig site as my home. I would like to thank Ralph Nader, whom I speak with frequently, as well as Cornel West and James Cone, who, along with Noam Chomsky, are the intellectuals I admire most. Thanks also to my good friend Joe Sacco, who produces, year after year, brilliant, astonishing, and original work that never wavers from his clarion vision of what it means to be a truth teller, an artist, and a rebel.

  Other friends and colleagues who have supported me in my work include Kevin Zeese; Dr. Margaret Flowers; Steve Kinzer; Peter Scheer, who holds together Truthdig; Narda Zacchino, whose talents as a writer and editor rival those of her husband Bob Scheer; Kasia Anderson; Donald Kaufman; Dwayne Booth, who ranks with Sacco as a cartoonist; Max Blumenthal; the Reverend Terry Burke; Paul Jay; Bonnie Kerness; Ojore Lutalo; Alexa O’Brien, my friend and coplaintiff who, along with the lawyers Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran, led our suit against Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act in federal court; Ann and Walter Pincus; Jennifer and Peter Buffett; John Timpane; Marty Brest; Roy Singham; Peter Hershberg; Richard Wolff; Maria-Christina Keller; Lauren B. Davis; June Ballinger; Michael Goldstein; Gerald Stern; Anne Marie Macari; Tom Artin; the Reverend Michael Granzen; the Reverend Karen Hernandez; Joe and Heidi Hough; Mark Kurlansky; my former Shakespeare professor Margaret Maurer; my mentor and former religion professor the Reverend Coleman Brown, who has critiqued and edited many of my books and whom we lost as this book was being finished; Irene Brown; Sam Hynes, who proves there are scholars who are also great writers; Sonali Kolhatkar; Francine Prose; Russell Banks; Celia Chazelle; Toby Sanders; Esther Kaplan; and John Ralston Saul. Dorothea von Molke and Cliff Simms, who run one of the finest bookstores in the country and donated over 700 books to the prison library in New Jersey where I teach, are valued neighbors. I would finally like to thank the students in my classes at East Jersey State Prison. They inspire me with their fierce commitment to the life of the mind, their brilliance, and their deep integrity. I look forward every week to our classes. The crime of mass incarceration means their families, as well as the wider society, are deprived of their talents, their wisdom, and their contributions. This is an injustice we must fight.

  Lisa Bankoff of International Creative Management handled the contracts, as usual, for the book. We have been together since my first book. I look forward to a long continuation of our partnership.

  My four children, Thomas, Noëlle, Konrad, and Marina, along with Eunice, comprise my precious universe, the one that keeps me whole. Konrad and Marina, my youngest, make for a noisy and chaotic household, one that is not always optimal for the prolonged silence coveted by a writer, but they infuse our lives with irreplaceable joy, wonder, and beauty. I write and struggle for them. I worry about the world they will inherit. I fear I have never done enough.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 95–137, 137.

  2. Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (Ricordi) [1528], trans. Mario Domandi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), Series C-1, 39.

  3. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France [1871], in The First International and After (New York: Verso Books, 2010), 226–228.

  4. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 34.

  5. Ibid., 56.

  6. Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848], authorized English translation, edited and annotated by Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 9–21.

  7. Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, 101.

  8. Ibid., 89–90.

  9. James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27, no. 1 (1962): 5–19, reprinted in When Men Revolt and Why, ed. James Chowning Davies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 133, 135.

  10. Ibid., 133–134.

  11. Ibid., 140.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., 141.

  14. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 353.

  15. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, “The Uncomfortable Truth About American Wages,” New York Times, October 22, 2012.

  16. Barbara Ehrenreich explores this false promise in her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (New York: Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2009).

  17. Rami Zurayk, “Use Your Loaf: Why Food Prices Were Crucial to the Arab Spring,” The Guardian, July 16, 2011.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Liz Alderman, “More Children in Greece Are Going Hungry,” New York Times, April 17, 2013.

  20. Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012,” Current Population Reports P60-245 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, September 2013), http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf (accessed June 14, 2014).

  21. According to the summary for Elise Gould, Hilary Wething, Natalie Sabadish, and Nicholas Finio, What Families Need to Get By: The 2013 Update of EPI’s Family Budget Calculator (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2013, http://www.epi.org/publication/ib368-basic-family-budgets/, accessed December 15, 2014): “The basic family budget for a two-parent, two-child family ranges from $48,166 (Marshall County, Miss.) to $94,676 (New York City). In the median family budget area, Topeka, Kan., a two-parent, two-child family needs $63,364 to secure an adequate but modest living standard. This is well above the 2012 poverty threshold of $23,283 for this family type.”

  22. DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012,” 15.

  23. National Center for Law and Economic Justice, “Poverty in the United States: A Snapshot,” http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php.

  24. J. R. Porter et al., “Food Security and Food Production Systems,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Part A, Global and Sectoral Aspects: Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2–4.

  25. Vladimir Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Chippendale, Australia: Resistance Books, 1999), 83 (emphasis in the original).

  26. The histori
ans and political philosophers who have examined the phenomenon of revolutionary waves include Robert Roswell Palmer, Crane Brinton, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hoffer, Jacques Godechot, and Antonio Gramsci.

  27. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1913–1926, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

  28. Ibid.

  29. Friedrich Engels arrived in England in October 1842 to work for his family’s cotton business in Manchester, where he witnessed the deplorable conditions in the mills. He drew on what he saw to write The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and became a contributor to the Chartist newspaper Northern Star.

  30. Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 39–41.

  31. Adam B. Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions: Revolutionary Thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 12.

  32. Auguste Blanqui, “Contre le Progrès” [“Against Progress,” 1869 manuscript], published in Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes: L’Éternité par les astres et autres texts (Instructions for Taking Up Arms: Eternity According to the Stars and Others Texts), ed. Miguel Abensour and Valentin Pelosse (Paris: Éditions de la Tête de Feuille, 1972), 103–105; cited in Daniel Bensaïd and Michael Löwy, “August Blanqui, Heretical Communist,” Radical Philosophy 185 (May-June 2014).

  33. Auguste Blanqui, “La Critique sociale” (“Social Criticism”), part III of Auguste Blanqui, Textes choisis (Selected Texts), preface and notes by V. P. Volguine (Paris: Éditions Sociale, 1971), 74; cited in Bensaïd and Löwy, “August Blanqui.”

  34. Ibid., 159.

  35. Quoted in Gustave Geffroy, L’Énfermé (Locked), vol. II (Paris: Éditions G. Crès et Cle, 1926), 19–20; cited in Bensaïd and Löwy, “August Blanqui.”

  36. Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings, vol. 1, ed. David Fernbach (London: Verso Books, 2010), 24.

  37. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 217–219.

  38. Nicholas Kulish, “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around the Globe,” New York Times, September 27, 2011.

  39. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), xviii (emphasis in original).

  40. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006), 289.

  41. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, xviii.

  42. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne (New York: Digireads, 2004), 78.

  43. Seumas Milne, “Venezuela Shows That Protest Can Be a Defence of Privilege,” The Guardian, April 9, 2014.

  44. Gabriel García Márquez and Subcomandante Marcos, “A Zapatista Reading List,” The Nation, July 2, 2001.

  CHAPTER I

  1. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 74.

  2. “Hurricane Sandy’s Rising Costs” (editorial), New York Times, November 27, 2012.

  3. Eric S. Blake, Todd B. Kimberlain, Robert J. Berg, John P. Cangialosi, and John L. Beven II, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Sandy, AL182012, 22–29 October 2012,” National Hurricane Center, February 12, 2013, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012_Sandy.pdf.

  4. Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, 23–30 August 2005,” National Hurricane Center, December 20, 2005, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf.

  5. Connor Adams Sheets, “Hurricane Sandy Anniversary 2014: NYC Victims Still Waiting for Home Repair Funding Two Years After Storm Hit New York,” International Business Times, October 28, 2014; Hilary Russ, “New York, New Jersey Put $71 Billion Price Tag on Sandy,” Reuters, November 26, 2012.

  6. Russ, “New York, New Jersey Put $71 Billion Price Tag on Sandy.”

  7. “De-coding the Black Death,” BBC News, October 3, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1576875.stm.

  8. Climate Vulnerability Forum, Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet, 2nd ed., http://www.thecvf.org/web/publications-data/climate-vulnerability-monitor/2012-monitor/.

  9. Koko Warner, Charles Ehrhart, Alex de Sherbinin, Susana Adamo, and Tricia Chai-Onn, “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement,” Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Earth Institute of Columbia University, May 2009, http://ciesin.columbia.edu/documents/clim-migr-report-june09_media.pdf.

  10. Andre Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage, 2006), 6–7.

  11. Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1921).

  12. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature [1923], vol. 2 (New York: Penguin, 1990).

  13. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Mariner Books, 1955), 138; Lewis Mumford, “The Significance of Herman Melville,” The New Republic, October 10, 1928, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114098/significance-herman-melville-lewis-mumford-stacks.

  14. Nathaniel Philbrick, “The Road to Melville,” Vanity Fair, November 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/11/moby-dick-201111.

  15. Edward Said, “Islam and the West Are Inadequate Banners,” The Observer, September 16, 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/16/september11.terrorism3.

  16. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001).

  17. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Necessity in the New World (New York: Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2014); Morris Berman, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).

  18. Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick? (New York: Viking, 2011), 6.

  19. International Programme on the State of the Ocean, “Greater, Faster, Closer: Latest Review of Science Reveals Ocean in Critical State from Cumulative Impacts” (press release), October 3, 2013, http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/IPSO-PR-2013-FINAL.pdf.

  20. Seth Borenstein, “Study: Species Disappearing Far Faster Than Before,” Associated Press, May 29, 2014.

  21. Binyamin Appelbaum, “Citing Growth, Fed Again Cuts Monthly Bond Purchases, New York Times, January 29, 2014.

  22. “Bloomberg Billionaires: Today’s Ranking of the World’s Richest People,” Bloomberg.com, April 22, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/2014-04-22/cya.

  23. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

  24. Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (London: Earthscan, 2010), xiv.

  25. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Climatic Data Center, “Climatological Rankings,” http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/climatological-rankings/index.php?periods%5B%5D=12¶meter=tavg&state=110&div=0&month=12&year=2009#ranks-form; see also World Meteorological Organization (WMO), “WMO Annual Climate Statement Highlights Extreme Events,” press release 985, March 24, 2014, http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_985_en.html.

  26. Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Charles L. Redman, Human Impact on Ancient Environments (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999); Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

  27. Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Scribner’s, 1965), 39.

  28. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Castle to Castle (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 184.

  29. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crak
e (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 120.

  30. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 1987), 37.

  31. Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York, Random House, 2001), 319.

  32. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (New York: Vintage, 1985), 231.

  33. Ibid., 227.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid., 299–300.

  36. Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 26.

  37. Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1986), 9.

  38. Ibid., 108.

  39. J. M. Coetzee, “Emperor of Nostalgia,” New York Review of Books, February 28, 2002.

  40. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), 417.

  41. Ibid., 211.

  42. Ibid., 164.

  43. Ibid., 166–167.

  44. Ibid., 164–165.

  45. Ibid., 167.

  46. Ibid., 69.

  47. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 65.

  48. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), 417.

  49. Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, 56–57.

  50. Melville, Moby-Dick, 519.

  51. Ibid., 186.

  52. Ibid., 113.

  53. Ibid., 169.

  54. Ibid., 561.

  55. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” [written in 1921], reprinted in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Ibid., 288–289.

  CHAPTER II

  1. Paul Celan, “Death Fugue,” Mohn und Gedächtnis, © 1952, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH.

  2. Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator, available at: http://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/.