Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  Because neither man sold out or compromised, they were killed. If King and Malcolm had lived, they, too, would have become pariahs, victims of the liberal class.

  That liberal class is indifferent to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country, still entranced with the aphrodisiac of Obama’s victory. Liberals argue that offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health-care policies is a step forward. They argue that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They argue that the refusal to assist the estimated 2.8 million people forced out of their homes in 2009 and the estimated 2.4 million forced out of their homes in 2010 by foreclosure and bank repossessions is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity.

  Dean Henderson’s career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. Because of the swelling and the pain, he spends most of his days with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, which he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance. He fears his future.

  Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work—Henderson made $18 an hour—and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism.

  “This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles,” Henderson, a forty-year-old military veteran, told me:

  My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008, FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers’ compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me, and none of this was my fault.36

  Our destitute working class now understands that the cloying feel-your-pain language of the liberal class is a lie. The liberal class is not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, or jobs from being exported. The gap between a stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities, fatuous academic and financial experts, oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are often willing to listen to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is becoming synonymous with right-wing populism.

  Obama, seduced by power and prestige, is more interested in courting the corporate rich than in saving the disenfranchised. Asked to name a business executive he admires, the president cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale’s secret Skull and Bones Society along with George W. Bush and John Kerry, served as Senator John McCain’s finance chair during McCain’s failed run for the presidency. Smith founded FedEx in 1971, and the company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May 2009. Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Such men build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of people like Henderson.

  “He’s an example of somebody who is thinking long-term,” the president said of Smith in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, adding that he “really enjoyed talking” with him at a February 4, 2009, White House luncheon.

  Smith does think in the long term. His company lavished money on many members of Congress in 1996 so they would vote for an ad hoc change in the law banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at FedEx. A few stalwarts in the Senate, including Edward Kennedy (in a speech reprinted in the Congressional Record on October 1, 1996) and his then-colleague Paul Simon, denounced the obvious political bribery. The company had bought its legislative exemption. Most members of Congress, then as now, had become corporate employees.

  “I think we have to honestly ask ourselves, why is Federal Express being given preferential treatment in this body now?” Senator Simon said at the time. “I think the honest answer is Federal Express has been very generous in their campaign contributions.”

  Following the Senate vote, a company spokesman was quoted as saying, “We played political hardball, and we won.”

  What has happened to our historical memory? How did we forget that those who built our democracy and furthered the rights of American workers were not men like Smith, who use power and money to perpetuate the parochial and selfish interests of the elite, but the legions of embattled strikers in the coal fields, on factory floors, and in steel mills, who gave us unions, decent wages and the forty-hour work week? How was it possible to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement? How is it possible that it remains in force? Union workers, who at times paid with their lives, halted the country’s enslavement to the rich and the greedy. But now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are transforming our working class into serfs.

  UPS, by contrast with its competitor FedEx, is unionized. It is the largest employer of Teamsters members. Labor costs, because of the union, account for almost two-thirds of its operating expenses. But Smith of FedEx spends only a third of his costs on labor. There is something very wrong with a country that leaves a worker like Henderson in a tiny apartment in excruciating pain and fighting off depression while his former billionaire boss is fêted as a man of vision and invited to lunch at the White House. A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, breeds dark ideological monsters that will inevitably rise to devour the body politic.

  FedEx has lavished $17 million on Congress—double its 2008 total—to fight off an effort by UPS and the Teamsters to revoke Smith’s tailor-made ban on unions. Smith, again thinking “long-term,” plans to continue to hire thousands of full-time employees and list them as independent contractors. If his workers are listed as independent contractors, he does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance taxes. And when they get sick or injured or old, he can push them onto the street.

  Henderson says FedEx treats its equipment as shabbily as its employees. There is no difference between trucks and people to corporations that view everything as a commodity. Corporations exploit human beings and equipment, as well as natural, resources, until exhaustion or collapse.

  “The trucks are a liability,” Henderson said. “They are junk. The tires are bald. The engines cut out. There are a lot of mechanical problems. The roofs leak. They wobble and pull to one side or the other. The heating does not work. And the company pushes its employees in the same way. The first Christmas I was there, I worked thirteen hours without a break and without anything to eat.”

  VI

  Rebellion

  One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is

  a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. . . .

  It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the

  certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that

  ought to accompany it.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, “An Absurd Reasoning”1

  ALEKSANDR HERZEN, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: “We think we are the doctors. We are the disease.” All resistanc
e must recognize that the corporate coup d’état is complete. We must not waste our energy trying to reform or appeal to systems of power. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance.

  The economic devastation of global capitalism will soon be matched by ecological devastation. The liberal class’s decision to abet the destruction of the global economy was matched by its tacit decision to abet the corporate destruction of the ecosystem on which human life depends. The valiant efforts of a few liberal activists, such as Bill McKibben, to organize worldwide demonstrations to pressure industrial and political leaders from the polluting nations to act swiftly at the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009, and thereby to thwart catastrophic environmental disaster, failed. The voices of the people did not register. The liberal class continued to bind itself to systems that, in theological terms, have become systems of death.

  Our environment is being dramatically transformed in ways that soon will make it difficult for the human species to survive. We must direct our energies toward building sustainable, local communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort. The liberal class, which clings to the decaying ideologies used to justify globalism and imperialism, which has refused to defy the exploitation or galvanize behind militants to halt the destruction of the ecosystem, has become a useless appendage. The decimation of our manufacturing base, the rise of the corporate state, and the contamination of our environment could have been fought by militant movements and radicals, but with these voices banished, there were no real impediments to the self-destructive forces of corporate power.

  The liberal class, which sought consensus and was obedient when it should have fought back, continues to trumpet a childish faith in human progress. It continues to peddle the naïve belief that technology and science will propel us forward into greater eras of human prosperity and save us from ourselves. But Enlightenment rationality does not and will not dominate human activity. The human race is about to be abruptly reminded of the fragility of life and the danger of hubris. Those who exploit human beings and nature are bound to an irrational lust for power and money that is leading to collective suicide.

  The liberal class assumed that by working with corporate power it could mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism and environmental degradation. It did not grasp, perhaps because liberals do not read enough Marx, the revolutionary and self-destructive nature of unfettered capitalism. American society, although it continues to use traditional and sentimental iconography and language to describe itself, has in fact been so radically transformed by liberal gullibility and unchecked corporatism that it bears no resemblance to its self-image. Corporate forces, whether in Copenhagen or the U.S. Congress, ignore the needs and desires of citizens. Corporate interests have seized all mechanisms of power, from government to mass propaganda. They will not be defeated through elections or influenced through popular movements. The working class has been wiped out. The economy is in ruins. The imperial expansion is teetering on collapse. The ecosystem is undergoing terrifying changes unseen in recorded human history. The death spiral, which will wipe out whole sections of the human race, demands a return to a radical militancy that asks the uncomfortable question of whether it is time to break laws that, if followed, ensure our annihilation.

  The corporation state is now as cornered as the rest of us. The decimation of the working class and, increasingly, the middle class, means that corporations must employ ever greater levels of corruption and coercion to continue to increase profits. Human misery is being compounded—indeed, it is itself viewed as a source of profit. Corporations such as Bechtel are attempting to buy and control the world’s supply of clean water. All essential elements for existence offer corporations the potential for profit. The demand for capitalist expansion, in a time of growing scarcity and environmental collapse, means we will endure harsher forms of abuse and repression.

  By silencing those who clung to moral imperatives, the liberal class robbed itself of the language and analytical means to make sense of the destruction. Liberals assumed that the engines of capitalism could be persuaded to exercise a rational self-control and beneficence—a notion that would have gotten anyone who proposed it laughed out of old militant labor halls. The liberal class, seduced by the ridiculous dictum that the marketplace could be the arbiter of all human political and economic activity, handed away the rights of the working class and the middle class. Even after the effects of climate change became known, the liberal class permitted corporations to continue to poison and pollute the planet. The liberal class collaborated with these corporate forces and did so with a stunning gullibility. The short-term benefits of this collaboration will soon give way to a systems collapse.

  The true militants of the American twentieth century, including the old communist unions, understood, in a way the liberal class does not, the dynamics of capitalism and human evil. They knew that they had to challenge every level of management. They saw themselves as political beings. They called for a sweeping social transformation that would include universal health insurance, subsidized housing, social reforms, deindustrialization, and worker-controlled factories. And for this they were destroyed. They were replaced by a pliant liberal class that spoke in the depoliticized language of narrow self-interest and pathetic “Buy American” campaigns. Our collapse, economic and environmental, might not have been thwarted by anarchists and others, but at least someone would have fought against it. The liberal class was useless.

  The coup d’état we have undergone is beginning to fuel unrest and discontent. With its reformist and collaborative ethos, the liberal class lacks the capacity or the imagination to respond to this discontent. It has no ideas. Revolt, because of this, will come from the right, as it did in other eras of bankrupt liberalism in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Tsarist Russia. That this revolt will be funded, organized, and manipulated by the corporate forces that caused the collapse is one of the tragic ironies of history. But the blame lies with the liberal class. Liberals, by standing for nothing, made possible the rise of inverted and perhaps soon classical totalitarianism.

  As communities fragment under the weight of internal chaos and the increasingly dramatic changes caused by global warming and economic despair, they will face a difficult choice. They can retreat into a pure survivalist mode, a form of primitive tribalism, without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community and the planet. This retreat will leave participants as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. It is imperative that, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, communities nurture the intellectual and artistic traditions that make possible a civil society, humanism, and the common good. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. As those who retained their identity during slavery or the long night of twentieth-century fascism and communism discovered, resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance. Music, theatre, art, poetry, journalism, literature, dance, and the humanities, including the study of philosophy and history, will be the bulwarks that separate those who remain human from those who become savages.

  We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilizations will blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites, who successfully convinced us that we no longer possessed the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe, will use their resources to create privileged little islands where they will have access to security and goods denied to the rest of us. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images by the organs of mass propaganda that permit th
em to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty, and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that—a fantasy.

  Radical anarchists often grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions. They know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism. But many also naïvely believe it can be countered with physical resistance and violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement about acceptable degrees of violent resistance. Some argue, for example, that we should limit ourselves to the destruction of property. But that is a dead end. Once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. The moment anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the fear and rage of the dispossessed.