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American freedom: The discourse of the
Market by Proxy
by Tom Wheat “As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone.”--Roosevelt- “Four Freedoms.”
The
History of freedom has inherently been constructed by political democracy.
Democracy originated in ancient Athenian Greece and despite its uneven system
of equalities takes its grace as the lineal descent upon the formations of
the corpus loci traditions of modern day liberty institutions, and structures
of evolved pluralistic government. So to has the notion of freedom been
thought to dually inhabit both the public and private spheres of human
interaction in a structured society, i.e., humanity's place in the
marketplace as a free actor of cultural and economic exchange of goods and
ideas and the sum total of that market interaction producing a synergistic
free flow of capital that propelled Western Civilization to the status that
enjoys today --one of core political social and economic hegemon. The
archetypes of democratic Western Civilization, Solon and Kliesthenese, officiated a slave
supported Democracy, and justice dispensed by archons and oligarchy. The
extent of freedom was regimented through a five tiered class system, with the
bottom being that of a slave, followed by a Thete, (laborer) then zegutai
(artisan), Hippeas, (calvary), and Pentakostamedemnoi (the aristocracy -
supported archonship). The system of government and the vote in the common
assembly was open only to the first three classes on the basis of their
qualified ability for property ownership. Participation in the polis formed
the corpus of everyday life for those qualified for citizenship. Political
Assemblies were often held in conjunction with Street markets and so the
ideological myth of majority free labor, and citizen participation in
democratic government came to be sustained and predicated on the notion of
the market as the authenticator and beneficiary of governance. The tradition
of Roman codified law articulated a common republican root to the genius of
emperor, sustaining the drive towards the west's first experience with
continental empire. The Roman republican ideal of Cinncinatus the farmer, who serves in the
legions of Rome and then returns to his field, marked the notion of roman
citizenship as requiring independent free farmers to sustain the demands of
that early colonial empire. This metaphor would later be invoked after the
American Revolution in describing George Washington’s decision to forego a
third term and not to be elected as Generalissimo Dictator for life in the
new American republic. The first 2000
years of Western Colonization marked the evolution of western trade and
philosophy the latter of which supported the ideological drive towards modern
progress. First was the notion of uniform law to regulate the flow of
commerce and second was one of which important decrees were granted that
sustained the innate notion of majority liberty against arbitrary authority,
i.e., the imposition of the Magna Carta on King John by his nobles in
1215, C.E. The sovereign feudal lord of the Middle ages relied on the
Crusades to expand the frontiers of Western trade into the middle east, and
to garner a market share in the silk road caravans of the Asian Market.
Increased Western trade consolidation inevitably brought the interchange of
eastern and western ideas, i.e., the re-discovery of Aristotle and Algebra
but gradually these Arab variants introduced to Western Civilization were
gradually subsumed by western theories of material evolutionary dominance.
With
the rise of centralized political authority and Mercantilism, monarchy and
capital reached a synergistic accord, beginning with the Spanish inquisition,
the apocrypha of ordered harmony replaced freedom, culminating in the
colonization of a hitherto undiscovered continent, America. The Mercantile
Economy had centralized the governments of Europe and had also created an
economic autonomy for the merchant classes, some of whom in the case of the
Republic of Venice became wealthy and as powerful as kings. These merchant
republics in Italy precipitated the rise of mercantile capitalism throughout
Western Europe. The
Zeitgeist of capitalism was conceived as having been spurned on by the
Renaissance trade alliance balance of power between the middleman Turks and
Western European merchant traders. Russian Tsar Peter the Great opened
formally closed Mongolian trade routes to Asia by office of vicar and the
wealth of Asia flowed into the German-Templar Hanseatic league. These
Merchants formed an ethos to success, that later were to form the
institutional foundations for Calvinism and its worldview toward progress,
virtue and modernity. The liberty to coin fellowship to none under the
infallibility of a church ruler i.e., the pope, secularized Germany and
England from the influence of the Vatican Church bureaucracy. The Beheading
of Thomas More ended the debate between
church authority and secular Anglican authority in England. [1] Secularization of authority was heralded
as a great grant of liberty to freedom. This new period received what was the
qualification for an increase in rational liberty as Hobbes conceived of it
--the commonwealth law of kings to rule by class councilor decree, and rule
by council of the elite-common elect without a divine mandate as the sole
authoritarian crux of temporal authority. As the western European Nations
geared inexorably towards centralization, rulers and parliaments also
implemented economic planning models of monetised commodity exchange and
export driven domestic economies as a form of state to state raw material
price warfare to substantiate the pause between consolidation of raw material
assets, i.e., printing and gunpowder would have in shaping the long-term
inheritance of risen European colonialism upon the world stage discourse of
freedom as apothecaries' measure. *** The
causal circumstances for Europe's centralization resulted from the invention
of movable type and the odes to the Gutenberg Bible echoed surplus
acquisition of raw material wealth which led to the specialization of all
material and labor capital, under a specific public or private designation or
delineation of authority under a system of uniform property laws that
formalized the code of class and economic market relations to the
relationship of authority of the state and the market as the ultimate end of
the scale of the surplus accumulation spectrum production of virtue. Hence
modernization was first conceived as the consolidation of all capital under a
physical, public and private bureaucracy. Max
Weber "the Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,"
(online) According
to Max Weber the revolution of double entry accounting provided the rational
technological apparatus for the rise of Capitalism in Europe. Kings decreased
the amount of provincial duties excised on the flow of merchant capital. The
end result was the beginning of the consolidation for the means of technological
innovation and production to be placed under the control of private
enterprise. This gave rise to a new powerful class of merchants and
burgeoning entrepreneurs that competed with the traditional royal public
sphere of core hegemonic authority. “The
most general pre-supposition for the existence of this capitalism is that of
rational capital accounting. Such Accounting involves first the appropriation
of all physical means of production – land, raw materials, machinery
tools,..as disposable property of autonomous private industrial enterprise.
This is a phenomenon known only in our time, when the army alone forms a
universal exception to it. In the second place, it involves the freedom of
the market, that is the absence of irrational limitations on trading.”(Weber[2] , On Capitalism, Bureaucracy and
Religion, 109) The
rise of merchant secular authority also contributed to the gradual
monetization and commercialization of public life, work and limited ownership
of land paralleled the rise of market towns centered on agricultural and
proto-industrial manufacturing, with surplus capital sustained and invested
upon usury. Land displacement of the commoner brought on by the emergence of
the new capitalist order precipitated the need for work and so capitalism
substituted dependant wage labor in place of the independent subsistence
farmer. According to Weber that Capitalism has evolved into a chaotic
quandary of rational deterministic fateful coercion and separation of the
worker from the means to procure and manufacture capital. Hence the peasant
was transformed into a laborer. “The
Capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the
individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an
individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It
forces the Individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market
relations, to conform to the capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer
who in the long run acts counter to these norms will be eliminated from the
economic scene just as inevitably as the worker who cannot or will not adapt
himself to them will be thrown into the street without a job.”(Weber, 115) Accordingly
Weber identifies that Capitalism as an institution of knowledge
indoctrination gradually came to outpace both the governments of state and
the bureaucracies of religion. “At
present under our individualistic political, legal and economic institutions,
with the forms of organization and general structure which are peculiar to
our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, as has
been said, purely as a result of adaptation. …In such circumstances men’s
commercial and social interests tend to determine their opinions and
attitudes…Modern capitalism has become dominant and has become emancipated
from its old supports. At one time it was able to destroy the old forms of
medieval regulation of economic life only in alliance with the growing power
of modern state and the same thing can be said about its relations with religious
forces.”(123-24) On
Foner Adam Smith, Locke, Black According
to the Historian Eric Foner, the American development of political freedom
embodied a complex of moral ideas.[3]
Thus, The universalities of our culture have innately been constructed on the
basis of difference and exclusion. Freedom is a set of practical rights and
entitlements that comes with citizenship. The struggle to define freedom in
America centered on the notion of whether equality was the antithesis to
freedom. Freedom’s evolution into
liberty after the American revolution witnessed the arrival of state’s rights
doctrines and morally legislated slave doctrines that justified the
enslavement of African Americans under the Eurocentric subjective notion of
liberty’s primacy to culture. The
outcome of the American Civil War settled the debate on the moral economics
of slavery, but not the debate concerning government’s role as the dispenser
of suffrage, rather liberty sufficed as a rational allotment of universal
variances and access to suffrage constrained by the color line of race.
States had eliminated all property qualifications from voting rights for all
white Americans by 1840. However, according to Foner, the theme of freedom in
America was one in which a nation had to rationally reconcile the conflicting
periods of its past expressions of freedom, to invoke a larger presently
sustained view of American freedom as it exists in the lives of ordinary
Americans as freedom justly earned, equal participation of citizenship – E
pluribus Unum. Foner
argues that the language of freedom if we are to ascribe that such a
condition exists, tends to be historically contrived as opposed to
theoretically subsumed in the popular imagination. The two most historically
common themes to freedom in America were political and economic freedom as
certain individuals vested in free choice. Political freedom carried early
significance from the original colonial state burgesses to the establishment
of the colonists calls to self determination in establishing their
inalienable right to revolt against a system of taxes and laws that did not
carry equal weight in political representation. The earliest historical
notion of American Economic freedom fundamentally involved the economic
autonomy of the farmer being vested with the means of owning private property
and the right to furnish the means of his own free labor as a measure of
independent agricultural subsistence, to outright defense of agrarian
fundamentalisms as being the ultimate core being of the American pursuit of
happiness. Ultimately, individual American freedom is defined by the Bill of
Rights. [4] The
philosophical traditions of American freedom initially carried religious
sanctification of the pre destined call to enrich the social order. Liberty
however, in common exercise is thought to have originated from John
Locke. It was Locke who first advocated that freedom was a
universal standard enjoyed naturally by all. That such a freedom in order to
create enlightened rational governance had to be adopted, codified and
dispensed by a common law elect, owing title to private property. During the
17th and 18th century, wage labor was conceived at this
time as a form of economic servility. Only indentured servants and
occasionally slaves worked for wages in the new republic. Freedom
and slavery comprise the two extremes of happiness and misery in a society.
American Freedom has required that liberty separate from the majority, the
common interests of abiding moral rational principle, the principle of
necessary exclusion, ‘other persons’ deemed necessary to support the system
of liberty as the instrument of class will. The Framers of the Constitution
defined appropriate political freedom as requiring a balance of uniform class
and cultural intent predicated between positive and negative virtues of
liberty suspended upon the notion that freedom of the many is choice for the
few. Liberty innately required the enslavement of others to sustain its
common held experience that it is better to not question the dichotomy of
master and slave more so then for the multitudes of progress to enjoy
liberty’s fruits since they alone acquiesce to know liberty’s true virtue.
Adam Smith the abolitionist and unknowing father of American Capitalism
reflected that in a republic it would be impossible to overthrow slavery
since the lawmakers themselves were slaveholders. According to Smith
ownership of property was the ultimate exercise of individual freedom. For the Southern Aristocracy, the thought
of the imposition of universal racial suffrage was inconceivable in a moral
or rational sense, because freedom qualified them the privilege of having
liberty, and to emancipate a slave would constitute a negative liberty that
would impinge on the inalienable right of property ownership and constitute a
form of enslavement and assault upon the Americanized ideal the free
independent Farmer. After
the American Revolution the government instituted the Naturalization Act of
1790. This act defined who was entitled to property, i.e., free white
people. Strangely, those excluded
were European aristocrats along with non-white persons. Both were viewed
under the prism of natural incapacity, as being deficient in the moral
qualities that made freedom possible. Liberty for a citizen required the
capacity for reason, though it was subsumed to exist naturally in Anglo
Saxony. However, not all whites were free in that women were viewed to be
irrational, passionate, and to overtly dependent upon Patriarchal authority
for survival. Furthermore, The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 effectively
defined the limits of freedom in the antebellum south despite its formal legal repudiation in 1801. The Act
passed as a result of the XYZ affair [5]
forbade media criticism and justified media censorship of government on the grounds of harmonious accordance to
the popular political view. The
experience of slavery was heralded with much more fervor in the south than
did it fully take institutional hold on the North rather the North was
credited with inventing the euphemistically free wage labor factory system. The
Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed the Southern aristocracy to count their
slaves as part of the overall population in determining congressional seats.
This method of counting involved a 3/5ths ratio affixed to each slave that
was to be counted as the proportional total allotment of seats in the House
of Representatives. The end result of the Missouri Compromise resulted in the
geographical distinction between slave states and free states. Freedom was
defined as both political freedom and political emancipation. The
Constitutional definitions for free and un-free persons reflected the
document’s vague reference to ‘other persons,’ those outside of the rational
order of civilization. Those persons
willfully excluded were Native Americans, and slaves. The rationale behind
Native American exclusion stemmed from tribes owing their natural allegiance
to their own tribal sovereignties, and hence was deemed not part of the body
politic. The other distinction of exclusion was applied to Slaves. Slaves were deemed to be irrational beasts
under the custodial of benevolent paternalist slaveocracy. Foner argues that
the contribution of ascribed universal liberty and economic self-interest and
the imposition of class and racial stigma upon a specific ethnicity was the
ultimate contribution of the West to the world as its enduring legate to
progress. (Foner, 38). According
to Thomas Jefferson the greatest threat to American freedom lay in large
government and the emerging capitalist economy tied to English capitalism.
Jefferson opposed the creation of a central banking institution and found
such an institution to be thoroughly undemocratic. .Source:http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/BofUS-H&J.htm
Jefferson also favored a 25-year
revolutionary cycle of purge to stimulate the tree of liberty. During
this time American civic life was conceived of being comprised of a public
sphere independent of government and lateral in influence. The
ideal of the male sole proprietor, entrepreneur marked the philosophical
legacy of Franklin’s Protestant ethos to success, however as the system of
Protestant Capitalism came to vigorously take hold on the public and private
consolidation of land, populations and social and political institutions,
that ideal changed into the iconographic image of the American free man as
the industrious, thrifty worker in a burgeoning industrial steel factory. The
growth of the Urban sector dramatically redefined the notion of America’s
eternal need for open spaces to colonize. With the rise of corporations,
liberty came to be redefined as “liberty of contract.” Corporate Power came
to be defined as industrial freedom, involving the sum total of American
moral and physical ingenuity. After
the American revolution the symbol for liberty, was represented by Ceres, the Roman Goddess of Agriculture,
whose image was politically
anthropomorphized into the image of the American goddess of liberty.
America perceived itself as undertaking the first free experiment in
self-governance in history. As such
the ideological view that America had a political proselytizing
message specified the ideological tenants of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe
Doctrine. During this time three factors would effect American conceptions of
freedom. 1.) territorial expansion, 2.)political democratization, and 3.) the
rapid rise and increase of market relations. Inherent to American economic
success was the belief and economic need for westward expansion, the need to
continuously colonize to sustain unlimited growth. The ideological view
of Manifest Destiny advanced the
notion that America had a divinely appointed mission to expand all throughout
North America. The idealism lay in the notion that America’s federal
structure had a separation of powers and a democratic system, and
equalization of power relationships between states hence freedom was subsumed
to embody an empire of believers.(Foner, 50)
By 1860 all states had eliminated property requirements for
voting. Between this time voter
participation was around roughly 80% of the white voting male populace. According
to Foner this was the beginning of pluralism, the political diffusion of
power underlining the ideal of the self-governing local community. In this
sense suffrage was a privilege and not a right. According to Adams, “Individual freedom was individual power.”
Government could balance this potential force by regulating the marketplace.
Like most Whigs, Adams favored compulsory public education. For other
established icons of American freedom such as Emerson, would comment upon, as
one of which Americans, were, ‘freedom fanatics.’ Marbury vs. Madison [6]necessitated
Class Freedom was dependant upon the ordered balance of state and federal
rights. In that Decision the US Supreme Court defined that no state law could
conflict with the constitution. In reality then under the discursive
terminology of ‘other person,’ the US passed the libertine test for
rationality when the South invoked states rights to justify slavery in the
south as a ‘free’ form of economic enterprise. During
the American antebellum period laissev faire economics came to be touted as
the ultimate expression of rational freedom. This belief was sustained by the
market industrial revolution of the 1820’s and 1830’s. During this time steam
power and canals facilitated the rise of rapid mass commercial transport
throughout the former colonies. The increasing economic surplus facilitated
the consolidation of merchant capital into factory capital and marked the
rise of the modern corporation. During this period the individual household
gradually receded from its role as the center of independent economic
production. Freedom was defined as
the ability to compete in the market place. The
moral manifest destiny of the age carried the crux of Protestant religion to
proselytize the subsumed glorious progress of the age culminating in the tent
revivalist meetings of the second “great awakening.” The congregations of the masses who
participated in the ‘Great Awakening’ believed that religion,
self-improvement and self-determination were the highest ideals of freedom.
For these idealists, Yahweh was a benevolent god and not a vengeful god who
disdained men for all eternity due to original sin; rather the development of
a closer relationship to the moral and natural spirit of God resulted in
freedom of the individual conscience. This was considered the highest form of
spiritual freedom. Yet the ideal of Christian freedom carried the duality of
secular and religious form. One the one hand individualism practically
defined its ode to success as involving a material profit base to virtue as
well as affirmation of divinity’s conscience within oneself. The..“Market revolution had a
contradictory impact on the inherited definition of economic autonomy as a
condition of freedom.”(Foner, 57) On the other hand the real and practical symptom
as to the measure and degree of freedom in the new capitalist market economy,
saw individual farmers become more enmeshed in market relations and
consequently many lost their independent autonomy to the dictates of the
market and the self interest of the emerging tycoons of business as the
rationale of capitalism had organized the American Entrepreneurial
consolidation of talent. Capitalism’s further development in the Cities made
them the centers of commercial exchange and manufacturing production.
Subsistence to the land was replaced by the freedom to have a job and earn a
wage, a revolution of circumstance often disdained by muse of antiquity.
Cicero the Roman logician believed that only slaves and non-free persons
worked for wages. Mass consumption of Capitalism was touted as evolved
economic freedom in that it stipulated that the source of wealth was now to
be vested in labor capital as opposed to traditional ownership and
independent means of production. The growing interdependent structures of the
marketplace gradually redefined freedom from the constitutionally ideal sense
and subsumed a real materialist rational edification as progress requiring
the specialization and organization of talent under an authoritarian
capitalist market structure. To the extent of its history, capitalism, and
Americanism have never been able to fully reconcile the loss of property
ownership with the substitution of wage benefit as being equal players in the
atomistic ideals of Capitalism’s creation. “Invigorated
by the popular conviction which dated back at least as far back as John
Locke, that labor was the source of all wealth and the worker entitled to the
fruits of his labor, the ideal of the autonomous small producer reemerged in
Jacksonian America as a full fledged critique of early capitalism and its
transformation of free labor into a commodity.”(Foner, 59) Furthermore Foner
states that the idealism of the commoner during this period held that wage
labor constituted wage slavery and that economic dependence was incompatible
with freedom. The ideal citizen was a farmer or independent manufacturer and
rather the factory system of labor was introducing an alien force of
despotism to America. (Foner, 60) The
19th century experience with slavery, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and Progressivism represented a
period when American’s held high regard for civic affairs-though those
affairs were seldom ennobled after initial intention. Strangely this ideal found its strongest
institutional hold among the minds of the slaveholding elite in the South.
According to John C. Calhoun, a free laborer was a slave to the community.
Calhoun later rationalized slavery as a paternalistic enterprise that
guaranteed white equality. This was natural to Calhoun since the Anglo Saxon tradition
had made white man in the image of freedom, and since the black was viewed as
a savage he was hence disqualified but still protected under the rational
benevolence of civilization proper. The Southern Clergy defended slavery
further by arguing that inequality was fundamental to human existence. The
father of capitalism, Adam Smith, first articulated the discourse against
slavery. Smith believed that slavery was a costly and inefficient means of
obtaining labor production. Rather Smith felt that production and innovation
could be increased by the wage incentive afforded by free labor. However,
Smith acknowledged that economic development would inevitably create
intractable class stratification and class conflict. Smith also believed that
while wage labor must exist it should be meaningful and enrich not only the
productive and industrial core of capitalism but that it should also enrich
the character of the individual worker. “The Understandings of the greater
part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man
whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations…has no occasion to
exert his understanding..He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
creature to become.”(Smith, quoted from Bob Black, “Abolition of Work.”)
Ultimately, the abolitionist movement of the North legitimized the wage labor
movement after the Union’s victory over the South. According
to Karl Marx, “the History of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.’ Marx was
influenced by Hegel's theory of the dialectic, that life was sustained by a
natural dialectic, conflict between the thesis and antithesis, and that the
sum total of that conflict produced the synergy of civilization. For Karl
Marx this would form the basis of his doctrine, historical materialism. Marx believed that unlike Hegel’s view of
the eternal dialectic, history would quash the dialectic of capitalism by
means of violent revolution and imposition of a classless utopia of the
proletarian dictatorship. Dialectical materialism required industrial
progress and for Marx would establish the natural laws that would govern this
new ideal utopia. Marx’s view of History was that it legitimized the progress
of the conqueror no matter how nefarious the means utilized and this was the
inherent nature of capitalist progress. Marx viewed the French Revolution as
a revolution by the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy. The Jacobin
revolution was a revolution of the petit bourgeoisie, (shop keepers and tradesmen)
and not the real disenfranchised poor who would later emerge out of
capitalism, the ownerless proliterate. Marx defined his dialectic as the
evolutionary doctrine that favored the immediate revolution of the state as
the preeminent power of centralizing authority. Marx believed that property
ownership was more important than voting rights so he envisioned a state
comprised of revolutionaries who doled out public land in common egalitarian
sustenance fashion whereby the state would embody the realized political
expression of the social system. Marx’s partner Engels owned a textile
factory. Engels livelihood was profoundly shaped by the Industrial
revolution. Engels believed that the key to social transformation lay not
within the mind rather in the ordered system of economic production. Both he
and Marx advocated the abolishment of private property and the
enfranchisement of the prolitierate. The peasants on the other hand were
viewed as reactionary and needed to be taught how to industrialize. Marx’s
avocation of the end of private property, stemmed from his belief in the
theory of unity and action. The Community should own the corporate wealth in
common and dole out in accordance to the degree of labor that sustains the
facilitation of community production. Marx
believed that free trade was limited in duration and eventually it would
bottleneck into monopoly-centered production. Marx also believed that ideas
about freedom are generally not independent of historical and socioeconomic
experience. According to Marx only those who have a stake in property have
true rational loyalty to a nation. Accordingly he defined the proliterate as
ownerless of property and hence deduced that the laborer still had not a
country ready to receive him according to his natural talents. The ideal
state was conceived as the means for state controlled centralized production
to include the proletarian as its ruling class with the caveat that labor was
the source of all value. Hence Marx believed that the surplus value sustained
as result of this cooperation would create working class independence and
true emmancipatory freedom for the American worker. Communism, the modern
attempt to implement the writings of Marx by state societies never achieved
the level of egalitarian autonomy so heralded by Marxist theory. (Source:
Introduction to the Communist manifesto) The
historical contradictions between wage labor and property ownership
inherently produced their own ordered subsets of positive and negative liberties.
The emancipation of slaves in America was only accomplished by the willing
acquisition of Northern Capitalists who saw free wage labor to be more
profitable than slave labor. Later
periods of American history would pick up after the excesses of
capitalism’s “Gilded and progressive
ages.” However, America still
inherited an ideology of freedom that would later translate into the next
century as the struggle for civil rights now that universal standards had
been agreeably subsumed under the economic will of power. The 20th
century In 1902
Theodore Schroder founded the Free Speech league. For most Americans, before
the 20th century, Civil rights and their legal source of guarantee
the Bill of Rights had little bearing on the minds and lives of the populace.
However, between 1900-1915 the supreme court ruled on more free speech cases
than the total of all free speech cases brought before the court in the
preceding century. Most of the free speech cases involved the rights of the
motion picture industry and advertisers seeking non-governmental regulation
in regards to airing of media content. Some of the cases also involved Labor
issues such as the right for Labor to strike against economically unfair
working conditions. In all the 1st
Amendment was conceived as the most cherished form of freedom in that it
specifically allowed for the free expression of freedom in a democratic
society. However, the 1st Amendment at this time was broadly
governed under obscenity statutes that sought to limit what the public could
regard as acceptable free speech. State Courts also had enacted injunctions
prohibiting labor protest rallies and distribution of union literature at the
picket lines. The court also placed restrictions on the right to disseminate
literature advocating birth control and feminist suffrage. (Foner, 164) According to Foner a lyrical left then
crafted the discourse of common freedom. “We are free who who live in
Washington square, [proclaimed a poem by Ralph Reed]. And the lyrical left
made freedom key to its vision of society. In so much as it elevated free
speech to the central place in the language of liberty, and expanded it from
defense of unimpeded political debate to a demand for free expression,
unrestrained by the state, on matters economic, artistic, and sexual.”(Foner,
166) According to
Foner, Labor’s first friend of the 20th century was the Marxist
inspired organization the IWW. This organization mobilized immigrants and
minorities otherwise excluded from the social status quo. The IWW relied
on street gatherings to organize
membership. However, the hostility that the IWW received from pro-business
interests translated into mob violence and vigilantism as was the case in San
Diego in 1911. With the
outcome of WWI the Wilsonian liberal establishment sought to
portray the War as a war for freedom and as a war to end all wars. Among the most prominent ‘liberals who supported the war, were
Gompers, Dewey, Florence Kelley, and Gillman. Wilson was also willing to support women’s suffrage if it could
advance his internationalist coalitional plan for peacekeeping. His support
for women’s suffrage extended back to 1916 and his support culminated in the
passage of the 19th Amendment [7]to
the Constitution in 1920. The IWW along
with a few other fringe movements opposed the war. Wilson’s response to
dissent for the war was to create the CPI – Committee of public information,
to explain the reasons behind the necessity for citizens to support America’s
stand against the emerging balance of power absolutism in Europe. The CPI furnished pro war propaganda and
enlisted for the first time the skill of artists and journalists to
rationalize the government’s stand on the necessity for war as a prelude to
peace. Furthermore, 75000 men were sent out to small towns all throughout
America to explain the aims war effort to the people. Edward
Bernays, the father of American public relations, thought that the government
was manipulating popular opinion in support for the war effort. However,
Wilson had his necessary bogeyman in the image of Kaiser Wilhelm, the German
dictator. Wilson’s propaganda team portrayed the Germans as wild barbarian
Huns whose only keen rational sensibility was towards the archaic structures
of absolutism. Wilson did make a number of concessions to some labor
movements, mostly in the nature of facilitating dialogue, and he expanded
that notion towards the later creation of his 14 point peace plan which was to set the
foundation for international conceptions of freedom, ultimately forming the
international organization, the League of Nations. Wilson also made it clear
that WWI was a war against colonialism. (170). In all the champion theme of
the age was that industrial democracy could create individual freedom and an
ordered set of conveniences to every day life. Wilson also officiated the
Adamson act that officiated the 8-hour workday for railroad workers. Later
most corporations would adopt this 8-hour day. African
Americans during this period articulated a different discourse to freedom
then the one held in common by the economic majority. While many leaders like
WEB Duboise supported the war as a means to advance the cause of black
suffrage, according to William Monroe Trotter, German atrocities at the war
front were no different then the lynching brought on by whites fearful of
black claims to freedom. (Foner, 173)
The economic reality of war however was one of increased production
leading to more sources of employment. To the extent that these opportunities
were made available to Blacks parallels the rapid immigrations of blacks from
the South to the Northern Industrial states during the war. For many blacks this was a symbol of
freedom, crafted in the biblical metaphor of Moses’ Exodus from Egypt. However, Lynching during this period also
increased as well in the southern states.
The ultimate outcome of WWI more or less left the same balance of power
colonial system intact and so many people were disillusioned, and Wilson
himself suffered a nervous breakdown and died soon after the war’s end. Many
Blacks felt betrayed by Wilson and soon black leaders would call on the
forces of black self-sufficiency in the nodes of economic production, as
evinced in the case of Marcus Garvey. During WWI
union membership doubled to 5 million workers. However after the war,
(1919-1920) witnessed the greatest period of labor unrest the country had
ever known. According to Foner, many
laborers denounced their employers as “Kaiser” and left their jobs. A series
of miner protests in Kansas and West Virginia and a steel worker strike in
Pennsylvania, the latter involving 365,000 workers, mostly immigrant, led to
the gradual governmental restrictions on civil liberties. This was
accomplished by the events of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, creating a
red scare in the minds of American government and business officials.
Ultimately, key union organizers such as the IWW in its entirety were
expunged and its leaders deported from America. According to DH Lawrence, America was systematically becoming a
free mob that was destroying the right to dissent. Meanwhile business seized
on the rhetoric of Industrial democracy and utilized that rhetoric as a
defense against labors desire for forge collective bargaining agreements.
(179) Furthermore, Corporations strove to identify Unions as Communistic and
naturally Un-American. The ultimate
ideal of American freedom was Laissev faire economics, the virtuosity of
ordered greed. In 1923 the Supreme Court Struck down all of the Child Labor
laws enacted by Wilson, declaring them unconstitutional. “”..The People
as a rational collective entity, invented during the American Revolution appeared
to have been rendered obsolete. Freudians emphasized the unconscious
instinctual motivations of human behavior; scientists pointed to war time IQ
tests allegedly demonstrating that large numbers of Americans were mentally
unfit for self government. “The Great bulk of the people are stupid,” one
advertiser commented, explaining why ads played on the emotions rather than
providing actual information.”(Eric Foner, 181) Walter Lippman writer of
Public opinion and the Phantom Public argued that the American voter is
misinformed and myopic in character. In an age of mass consumption the
independent citizen was a myth. Lippman was also credited for inventing the
concept of manufactured consent. [8] In 1920 Thomas
Dewey and Rogers Baldwin founded the ACLU.[9]
Oliver Wendell Holmes the defender and foremost restrictor
of free speech in his day argued that the 1st Amendment did not prevent
Congress from prohibiting free speech that presented a ‘clear and Present
Danger’ of inspiring insurrectionary or otherwise ‘illegal actions.’ “The 14th Amendment[10]
obligated the states from refraining from unreasonable restraint on the
freedom of the press.” (Foner, 184) Overall Foner
defines the progressive era as being somewhat disingenuous in its attempt to
accord idealism with universal suffrage though no doubt a gradualist could
find satisfaction in the few modicum measures of subjective freedoms still
aligned with progress. To some extent Foner argues this was the peculiarity
of the 19th century spirit. (Foner, 187) The gap in the
periods between the Progressive and New Deal eras marked a period of the rise
of the stock economy and the tumultuous boom and bust of the market as we
experience it to be today. The rise of mass communication and radio
integrated the reach of civilization into every household by the new Deal’s
end. The administrations of Harding,
Coolidge, and Hoover
saw the rise and fall of the first major collapse of capitalism in
civilization. Race and lynch mobs
became the tools of social control. (Foner, 187) Roosevelt’s ‘bull moose run’ in the election of 1920 propelled
Harding into office. The clan also
resurfaced in the 1920’s as well. Foner argues that the term white, all ready
defined as the qualified ‘free,’ created what sociologists describe as the
social construction of race, --something peculiarly innate to western
Civilization. (Foner, 189) This tradition inherently contrasted with cultural
or democratic pluralism. Some liberal thinkers of the day, notably the father
of American Anthropology, Franz Boas argued that the scientific basis of
racial eugenics was a pseudo science -though this view was not held in common
with the elite. Other forms of cultural upheaval were experienced in the form
of immigrant communities resisting the homogenization of urban and rural
neighborhoods to what Foner would describe as ‘coerced Americanization.’
Rather liberty became replaced by the ‘Complex of national efficiency’
(Foner, 192) The age of the
New Deal, sought to address the nature and the right of Americans to have
economic security in a market far more volatile to individual investors than
to owners of large corporations. With
the triumph of American capitalism over the Nazi’s American economic freedom
heralded the new found freedom for its citizens to partake in a ale-carte
mass consumption of liberties in all forms of market-media expression of the
human commercialized psyche. In 1929 the
stock market crashed and American unemployment surged up to 25% of the
working class. Hoover’s laisseve faire response was to raise interest rates
thereby increasing the debt burden and so banks began to foreclose on
businesses and small farms. Freedom
defined by Herbert Hoover was
essentially, ‘unfettered economic opportunity for the enterprising
individual.’ Hoover also sent Douglas Macarthur to quash the protests in the
nations capital brought on by veterans of WWI who were demanding that the
government award their pension bonuses as previously promised in good
faith. Hoover’s laisseve faire
indifference cost him the election of 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election
with the promise to the citizenry that the federal government was now going
to assume the role as regulator of capitalism and provider of economic
security in times of economic collapse. New Deal liberalism under Roosevelt
transformed the democrat party from its original coalitional base of states
rights advocates to a broader platform of social legislation mandated and
dispensed by federal law. “Under
Roosevelt’s guidance, the Democratic party was transformed from a bastion of
localism and states rights into a broad coalition of farmers, industrial
workers, the reform minded urban middle class, liberal intellectuals and some
what incongruously the white supremacist south, all committed to federal
intervention to reconstruct the economy and provide Americans with Social
Security.”(Foner, 195) Freedom at this time came to be linked with the
expansion of the power of the federal government. In fact polls conducted in
1935, showed that 90% of the poor believed that government should guarantee
all those capable of work a job. Essentially freedom also was defined as
freedom from material insecurity. (Foner, 198) In 1933
Roosevelt labor coalition passed the National Industry Recovery Act. Two years
later in 1935, Roosevelt’s passage of the Wagner Act gave workers the right to
collectively bargain in labor disputes and if necessary form a union. In 1935 the first major Unions, the AFL
and the CIO
were formed as well. For the first time workers had representation in the
marketplace. The New Deal 2 also established the social security
administration and guaranteed every non-working aged or infirmed American a
federally guaranteed pension. Roosevelt
transformed the term liberalism from its original meaning, i.e., small
decentralized government and Laiseve faire economics into ‘an activists,
socially conscious state, an alternative both to socialism and unregulated
capitalism.”(Foner, 204) Roosevelt defined liberty as, ‘the greatest security
for the average man,’ Overall New Deal politics reflected political class
divisions and advanced a morally politicized view of class that previous
presidential administrations had ignored.
Also in 1937 the US Supreme Court allowed the Federal Government to
re-institute regulatory safety and child labor laws. The New Deal
advanced the notion that Americans had the universal right to be economically
secured. However, many were still excluded from its programs of economic
outreach. Blacks and Women were still unable to have their issues of
universal class suffrage addressed. In 1937, Roosevelt
also began to lose support from Southern Democrats when some of his policy
platforms were perceived as laying the foundations for re-addressment of race
relations. During this time Roosevelt advanced the notion that American
freedom was synonymous with individual home ownership. This was the impetus
for his founding of the Federal Housing Administration. However, as a
concession to the South the administration still insisted on racially
segregated communities as a condition of federal aid. In 1938 the
country was still in recession. While the New Deal was attempting to
reinvigorate the economy with Keynesian deficit spending, the looming threat
and eventual American conflict with German and Japanese Fascism was what
ultimately salvaged the New Deal and the American economy from collapse. The New Deal
did make ethnic pluralism a reality in modern government. During the
mid-1930’s the liberal left enjoyed a powerful position in shaping the
direction of American governmental policies. (211) The ultimate significance
of the New Deal was the substitution of the legal philosophy of Civil rights
in the place of what was once constitutionally defined as ‘freedom of
contract.[11]’(Foner,
216) In terms of freedom to dissent the passage of the Smith Act in 1940 made
it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the US government.[12] *** With the
outbreak of war American conceptions of liberty were defined in political and
ideological terms more so than they have throughout the remainder of the 20th
century in terms of significance in the ordinary affairs of the citizenry
during that century. The war
Mobilization of labor brought the nation out of the economic quagmire brought
on by the Depression. Roosevelt’s Four
Freedoms Speech[13]
outlined that the essential nature of benign democratic capitalism involved
an amalgamation of principles which included that the ideological chord of
the war propaganda effort would include the principle of freedom as it was
interpreted by the Bill of Rights, and that the essential nature of positive
freedom was ‘freedom from want.’ This
seemingly ambiguous principle referred to the no obstructionist principle of
the free flow of commerce, and freedom for the common man to be industriously
employed. “The
third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means
economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime
life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.” Foner defines that
dominant liberal vision of liberty was defined during this period to include:
“Freedom of speech and religion, scarcely required detached elaboration
although they received increased attention during the war as defining characteristics
of American life as opposed to Nazism their prominent place among the 4
Freedoms accelerated the process by which the Bill of Rights and especially
the 1st Amendment, moved to the center of American’s definition of
liberty.”(Foner, 223) The moral language of
freedom as the struggle against tyranny as assimilated and dispersed to the
court of public opinion ultimately involved the use of government propaganda
to justify the political and economic reasons for justified intervention into
WWII. Liberty met aggrandized libertine propaganda during the war and hence
it was quantifiably subsumed under an ordered modality of discursive meaning,
articulating that government was taking a moral and political stand against
Fascism and that the notion of accountability to moral tenants was subsumed
for public elevation and consumption to invoke the discourse of whether the
government legitimately held to its clearly defined position of moral civic
authority. In 1943 the government enlisted the aid of corporate executives in
establishing the Office of War Information, headed by the direction of
Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Sumner Welles. OWI’s corporate advertising
executive hierarchy was dominated by thoroughly monetarily conservative
ideology that morality is sold best in diatribe form. One OWI executive
proclaimed that freedom defined is ‘freedom promoted not explained.’ The OWI
commission’s chief backers in Congress were republicans and southern
Democrats. At this time Roosevelt diverted funding away from WPA and the CCC
to focus the entirety of America’s productive capacity for the war effort.
During this period corporate executives dominated the federal employment
rolls as Federal agencies centralized all industrial production for the war.
(229) Roosevelt died in 1944. He
was replaced by Harry S. Truman. With the victory of the US
over Germany and Japan in 1945 the US entered a period of economic
prosperity. The US, GNP doubled, after the War and American consumers had a
surplus of goods and income along with a centralized military industrial
complex that had never before existed in its history. During this time
another great migration of rural people’s marked a growing urbanization of
American daily life. Furthermore, in 1945, 15million people, a full 1/3 of
the non-farm labor force were fully unionized workers, the highest percentage
of union workers in America’s history. Between 1940-1947 25 million people,
1/5 of the entire population of the time was engaged in rural migrations
toward urban centers of economic production.
Increasingly the scope of the vision of the US as now being vested
with an international mission to police world affairs sustained the rise of
corporate and governmental bureaucracies increasingly affecting the total
regimentation of society by the principle of work for mass consumption and
necessary war to sustain that consumption of capital and wealth in accord
with an emerging ideological view of free enterprise as the ultimate
guarantor of peace and bringer of democracy to the world’s millions who
existed under authoritarian un-American systems. For Corporate America the
chief feat discerned in crafting propaganda for the war effort was that the
means were an ends of their own that in order to sell a product the ‘words themselves should sell’ instead of
‘ideas’ behind the utilitarian purposes of the product would function as a
form of consent by the consumer in the free mode of production as being a
legitimate economic stake in freedom. Hence ‘all products’ whether of war
value or peace value became transposed under the ideology of consumerism, as
a patriotic virtue.[14]
The question though was whose patriotic vision were we enriching the
government or the corporation’s view of freedom? At the time the forestall of market saturation was
accomplished through Democratic Wage and Price Controls making labor, for a
time ‘a junior partner in government.’ In the economic planning
arena conservatives and liberals debated the relative merits of the need for
full employment or neccassary partial unemployment. Truman settled the debate
momentarily by implementing the Full
employment Bill of 1946. To have a job was to be invested in political
freedom. Truman also desegregated the Armed Forces. During this time America’s
international emergence as a global superpower under the ideological will of
free capitalism inevitably led to confrontation with the Soviet Union the
other key producer of military hardware for the original allied war effort.
Soviet National power was the authoritarian anathema that galvanized the
ideological sway of America’s value system toward that of the notion of
innate binomial conflict and struggle, between capitalism and communism with
often references to biblical allegory as the status of the conflict rested
solely upon the struggle of good versus evil. Now it is up to the reader to
sort ideology from innate conflict. The last time
the US military was part of an enduring social movement was in WWII when we
were battling the Nazi's and Fascist absolutism. America became the world
leader due to its ability to mass-produce and through victory by being the
dominant player received the torch of empire from English colonialism.
Participatory Democracy was viewed as having triumphed over autarky. American
ideals were thought to be universal. As America
expanded its Cultural and economic influence after WWII it has also had to
rely on its conventional military, including traditional allies, and allies
of necessity. The Cold War created the militarization and mobilization of an
international alliance structure in a bipolar balance of power system
necessitating that total war was to be avoided and conducted only through the
use of proxy intervention often under the doctrine of low intensity conflict
and carried out through a strategic set of alliances subsuming core and
client states and their relationship to raw material production. The
strategic line of doctrine between genuine security interests and economic
security translated into an ideology that was crafted and bureaucratically
imposed to enrich the agenda of Corporate America or in the case of Soviet
Russia, the production power of its military. The role of trade during the
Cold War was dependant upon conflict to sustain economic productive surplus.
Hence global supply side economics fulfilled the demands of the emerging
multinational defense-manufacturing industry as somewhat of a neutral agent
for the two superpower governments that sought to enrich their own regional
industrial core by supplying weapons to the Third World pursuant to the
resolve of both states to militarily intervene in the Third World and install
puppet regimes so as to facilitate in the massive proliferation of arms
throughout the world. At the end of WWII we inherited the mantle
of European colonialism. The country was transformed from a relatively free
democratic republic into a country that came to field an agenda of liberal
economic expansion at the expense of actual freedom and democracy in the
countries so affected by our imperialist expansion. Now as a world super
power we had to create a national security state and a central intelligence
agency to reinforce our dominance in world affairs. This forced us to
compromise many of our innate republican ideals of freedom. We then proceeded to support any fascist
regime ready to be economic suzerain so long as it wasn't socialist. As World
War II ended along with traditional European colonialism there was a genuine
belief among these countries that self-determination and sovereignty would be
restored, and that key social reform would be implemented. Many Asian
intellectual elites looked to American models while the warlords of Asia, the
wealthy autocratic elite admired American weapons to contain their populace
and enact power plays against their rivals. At the height of our expansion after WWII we entered an era of unparalleled economic prosperity. However, the democracy that created the power of unlimited mass production became the military industrial complex that guided US foreign policy after the war. In reality the Cold War was a means in which the military industrial complex created during WWII sought to maintain its function as a supplier of military hardware. Only by perpetually existing in a state of emergency could we continue to justify increased defense spending, while in the process we were making more enemies in the third world with our reactionary philosophy of propping up the dictator to safeguard democracy. In this process we came to train assassins and later would be terrorists, such as Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, among countless others. Cold War
military interventions were often based more on ideology and trade expansion
than out of real military necessity. With the Cold War, Interventions in
Korea and Vietnam were based on the Domino theory, an ideology that there was
a real threat to democracy and capitalism posed by the emergence of soviet
client states in Asia. In this
process the US military supported regimes that did not adhere to true notions
of either freedom, capitalism or democracy. Many
individual US soldiers on the other hand truly believed that intervention in
these Asian countries was justified, politically and ideologically. Most GI's
truly felt that their presence and the war that they were fighting would
eventually bring peace and freedom to a country under the threat of the
soviet expansionary menace. That with victory the American way of life would
come to the third world. The benefits of capitalism at home would come to
the peoples of the third world. According to George Kennan, the architect of American Foreign
policy, the Cold War could be described as being based on a bipolar system of
mutual antagonism. With the rise of the Cold war it became necessary to
maintain massive defense spending for the ideology of freedom, of which the
direct application came to be support for fascist regimes counter to the
ideals of freedom. In the 1960's we were still masters of the universe.
However, we attempted to fight three wars at a time when we had only the
economic power to wage two wars. The wars fought were the Cold War, Vietnam
War, and the War on Poverty. The end result of that was by 1968 we had
managed to acquire a huge deficit and European currency traders made a run on
the American dollar. The Nixon response was to de-link the dollar from gold
and float the currency. At this point Americans began to lose their economic
freedom. Soon we would have stagflation, inflation, oil embargos and a host
of maladies that would become a burden to the American empire and also would
lead to the erosion of American freedom.
After the 60's hangover subsided, American awareness for politics also
began to drift into the abyss of corporate relativism. The Burden of empire
was exacting its toll like Rome we also began to intellectually wither.[15] On the US Domestic front, the Cold War, with its ideology of
mutual adversary attempted to monopolize the political language of freedom by
seeking to reconcile the contradictions between US foreign policy to a notion
of liberty being ascribed to the primacy of the American nation alone despite
calls for moral universality. The
ideological task became a measure of economic discrepancy whereby through the
boom bust cycle lense of the present, the view stands to reason why so many
American’s are cynical about politics today. The growth of consumerism in America during the 1950’s marked
the homogenization of suburban life income and production were organized
along the profit demands supply schedules of the corporate military
industrial supply liners. For Isaiah Berlin this represented a form of
negative liberty in that the invasion of consolidated capital in the free
market was outstripping the source for alternatives rather conservative
rationality promoted nothing other than the old supply line theory of guns
and butter. According to the president
of the American History Association, Eric Foner, American freedom during this
period was nothing more than, “consumer capitalism.”(263) Freedom from want the ambiguous third freedom of Roosevelt’s
four freedoms, seemed to rule the conscience of Americans so the cultural
need for acceptance of unquestionable authority dominated the corporate
consumer culture of ordinary working Americans. The ballot box was tied in
with the paycheck and loyalty to the boss constituted the most intimate
source of authority for citizens, more so than government’s need for
cooptation of the regulatory mode in favor of laisseve line ‘we will just
alter the supply lines and continue with business as usual.’ In all of this a number
of important political causes for civil rights were advanced with the appointment
of Earl Warren as chief justice to the United States Supreme Court in 1953.
Earl Warren, (1953-1969) was initially conceived of being overtly a social
conservative, in fact the fist major civil suit involving civil rights, the
chief justice indicated that his long tenure would be one as a defender of
civil liberties and unlawful arrest. In Brown vs. the Board of
Education, Topeka Kansas, Earl Warren sided with Thurgood Marshal’s
argument that segregation violated ‘equal protection’ and that this nullified
the states right’s claims to block enforcement as an unwarranted attack on
state liberty. This Supreme Court ruling effectively overturned Plessey
versus Ferguson and the separate but equal doctrine of the advocators for
segregation. However, the actual implementation of the Court’s authority to
end desegregation in practice at the local and regional level moved slowly.
December 1st 1955, Rosa Parks started the eventual Montgomery bus
boycott that propelled the racial civil rights movement into the media
spotlight and vicariously consumed in popular imagination. Most African
Americans at this time believed that political freedom could only come in the
form of direct federal intervention. Eisenhower did in fact do this when he
sent in the US military to enforce desegregation in Little rock Arkansas.
(279) However for blacks, the lull between true freedom and token
freedom continued to nag and irritate if not boil over, in that as a minority
they were still bound by a 19th century conception of race that
constituted an economic color line. The lull between the Geneva accords
Sputnik and general Cold War military escalation pre occupied most Americans
under a homogeneous conception of patriotism as the government’s bottom line,
the maintenance economic status quo. Kennedy received political power when he
ran on the ‘missile gap’ platform that favored US nuclear proliferation as
deterrence to Soviet Expansionism. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 because
allegedly despite his good charm and wit, his suntan looked better on
television, instead of Nixon’s pasty pale like complexion. Eisenhower[16]
retired, bemoaning a military industrial complex he had commanded in WWII
that had evolved beyond the constraints of liberty’s restraint. In June of 1963 Kennedy did make a call for civil rights as a
national matter of federal policy. Historically Kennedy’s vision of civil
rights had historical appeal in his own Irish roots. In the minds of mainstream
African Americans, the centennial memory of the Emancipation proclamation
required American government to adhere to a codified moral imperative that
had already been made law, and subjectified by history’s experience with
racism, necessitated that in an age of economic progress morals should
elevate and evolve parallel with capitalism and individual consumer freedom.
Kennedy did not live to see his vision. For African Americans, viewing the tide of progressive
federalized institutionalized reform in the 9-year elapse between (Brown vs.
Board of Education) demonstrated that segregation, as a doctrine required a
moral antithesis. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling only 9% of African
Americans attended desegregated schools. Martin Luther king described the
disillusionment that many of its leaders felt for the Democrat party. Those
sentiments were to be heard in the later 1965 watts riots, preceding the
passage of the voting rights act. According to King the reasons for Blacks to
bring civil rights to national attention was that in : “…witnessing the drama
of negro progress elsewhere in the world, witnessing a level of conspicous
consumption at home exceeding anything in our history, it was natural that by
1963 Negroes would rise with resolution and demand a share of governing power
and living conditions measured by American standards rather than by the
standards of colonial impovoverishment.”(King, “Why
We Can’t Wait,” pg. 8) For blacks, In terms of employment opportunities only the lowest
paying menial jobs were available to them and automation of the factory line
began to lead to social upheavals as various job positions became eliminated
by increased production. For king this period of economic upheaval
necessitated his moral message that there be uniformity to justice. To King
freedom was an existential cultural mass of truth and hypocrisy, that resided
within the individual and the unconscious nature of society. When King was
sent to Jail for protesting segregation in Alabama he articulated his
position on African American nationalism as involving active and direct
non-violent action. This program for
revolution involved the collection of facts, negotiation, self-purification,
and direct action. The facts
collected concerned the numbers of racial lynching directed by Eugene Bull
Conner. All negotiations with the local civic authorities were rebuffed and
so teach-ins and non-violent workshops commenced. At the time Birmingham
Alabama was the most segregated city in the nation. For King this Program of
Non-Violent Action was the correct process for the African American to
cleanse himself the injury of having been a slave. According to King, non-Violent action would force the power
structure to acknowledge confrontation between racial inequities that were a
result of nothing more than depraved moral indifference to true justice. King
ever a classicalist compared the struggle of socratese to master his own man
as also embodying the African American struggle to master their freedom.
“Just as Socrates felt it was
necessary to create tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from
the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative
analysis and objective appraisals, so must we seek the nonviolent gadflies to
create the kind of tension in society that will help man rise from the dark
depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and
brotherhood.”(68) For King organization of non violent protest demonstrations
was the moral right of blacks to break the unjust laws of Jim Crow
seggregation. King using Acquinas’s
argument states that “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in
eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just,
any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All seggregation statutes
are unjust because seggregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.
It gives the seggregator a false sense of security and the seggregated a
false sense of insecurity.”(King, 71) LBJ, Kennedy’s vice president promoted a political platform that
favored Vietnam war escalation and domestic civil rights legislative
enactments embodied in his social and economic program, the ‘Great Society.’
The Johnson administration passed the EEOC, the Civil Rights Act, of 1964,
and the Voting rights act of 1965, both as a measure to the ‘Kennedy legacy’
and to advance support for the war in Vietnam. According to Foner these social policies, ..”eradicated the
[overt] legal basis of second class citizenship.”(Foner, 280) The theme of
the Great Society was an attempt by Johnson implement Roosevelt’s New Deal
program, and extend the outreach of those programs to low income- minority
groups. (Foner, 285) However, Black leaders still pointed out that despite
great institutional strides made by the ‘Great Society’ the reality was that,
black unemployment was 250% greater than white employment, suggesting the
presence of still more institutionalized racism. Martin Luther King wrote that “Open Housing and equal employment
opportunity’ remained a distant dream that required ‘structural changes’ in
capitalism itself in order to bring blacks fully into the social mainstream.
(Foner, 283) King believed that the
greatest obstruction to racial progress was the white moderate who favored
order over justice. Ultimately Kings discourse in an age of institutionalized
inequality was a message that the in order to create and sustain a positive
liberty like freedom required the relinquishment of the amoral belief that
immoral means can be used to accomplish moral aims. For king the greatest threat to freedom in a democracy was the
‘appalling silence of the good people.’(74) King was assassinated in 1968
along with RFK. The Tet offensive signaled a new phase of the Cold war. Vietnam War escalation
ultimately diverted funds from the ‘great society’, to the Cold War. The
ideological impetus for this doctrine of the domino theory, mandated that
military industrial suppliers stimulating production for the war complex
required conflict to sustain production quotas. Hence the Vietnam war was
waged as an attempt to incorporate the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere into
the orbit of Western Capitalism’s desire for access to more raw markets for
extraction. During this period consumerism came to be looked upon as a
negative virtue of capitalism’s success. [17]
The New Left became increasingly tied to civil rights and matters of economic
regulation. The role of the 60’s revolution on the traditions of the New Left
marked the redefinition of traditional role and the rise of a counter
cultural society. Feminism the civil rights quest of the 1970’s owed its
mainstream dissemination to Betty Friedan’s pamphlet, the “Feminist Mystique.[18]”(1962)
Friedan argued that Domesticity of the women constituted a form of
unreasonable societally induced selfless torture. The notion of women’s
character being assorted as nothing more than stock producing, ‘compulsive
baby machines’ provoked the Feminists to lobby and successfully see passage of the Equal pay Act of 1963. Friedan
would later go on to found the National organization for women, NOW in 1966. The end of the 60’s marked the assassination of the key figures
in civil rights, along with the deaths of college students at the hands of
the Army national guard at Kent State University. Nixon was elected to office
in 1969 partly due to Johnson’s acknowledgement that the Vietnam war had
sabotaged his great society programs, and that Nixon promised Vietnamization,
i.e., troop withdrawals from Vietnam. According to Mary Dietz, from “Dimensions of Radical
Democracy,” Americans have become dystopian as a society and have
developed a myopic view of liberalism. She defines true liberalism as being
inclined towards the notion that humans are innately, synergistically
motivated by pure atomistic competition that reflects rational and
instinctual agents influenced by pre civilization instincts. “Liberalism
conceives of the needs and capacities of individuals as being independent of
any immediate society or political condition.”(64). Secondly, she defines
true liberalism as the freedom to Self-actualize. Thirdly that there should
be a balanced form of egalitarian social policies that can balance the right
to choose between the dispersals of positive and negative liberties. The fourth
condition of true liberalism is the belief in unalienable rights and that
those rights allow for equal opportunity of access to all. According to Dietz liberalisim was created by capitalsim. This
capitalisim encroached on both the public and private spheres of daily life.
First was the subsumed notion of the public sphere, a place where women were
excluded from, commerce and authority positions, that were only reserved for
men. In this tandem liberalisim came to mean freedom from state interference
from the manner in which the household became the center of production. In
time with women being accepted into the public sphere the nuclear family made
male propertyship claims meaningless. Dietz argues that human nature is egoistic in that we all desire
equal access to the market. Democracy she argues is a product of the
capitalist market society.
Furthermore, all current authoritative and current concepts and
constructs of a society have been patriarchal constructed. For Dietz, the
true source of freedom in a society must come from people who can self consciously
evolve beyond meaningless distinctions of political rhetoric and market
induced consumerist mania and relate more to the positive cultural goals of
evolved civil society. The ideal power to Dietz, is to pluralize and diffuse
power as a mode of access and that citizenship equate to civil liberty.
Unlike the Marxists, however, Dietz says that they are ambiguous about
citizen’s rights because they assume that in a new revolutionary society
issues of class and race will not resurface, and this constitutes the
totality of statisim in that assumes the revolution alone accomplishes the
total struggle for a movement. On the conservative side of this liberalism
are what Dietz calls the maternalists who perpetuate a view that women’s
virtue is cultivated in the private sphere and it resolves itself through
mothering and that there is a moral primacy to family. However, Dietz questions the rhetoric of
the pure traditionalist who evokes an age of self sufficiencies in an age
were such an ideal rarely exists. Maternalists adopt pseudo-male patriarchal
terms to the innate person as being an independent, self-interested economic
being with total competition “mitigated by representation.”(71) Overall Dietz argues that feminism will always have to contest
and contend with womanisim. Furthermore she sees that there is a struggle in
the feminist movement between pure politics of access and disinterested
motivations that do not render them as self-conscious political actors rather
at the behest of the control of some male counterpart to society. According
to Mary Dietz, on commenting on the nature of democratic norms and values, in
America today, she states: “..that most Americans do not think of citizenship
in this way at all. We are hypnotized by a liberal conception of citizenship
rights, an unremitting consumerism that we confuse with freedom and a
capitalistic ethic that we take as our collective identity.”(Dimensions of
Radical Democracy, Dietz, 77) *** Ultimately the media interprets collective freedom or
institutionally redefines it as freedom to consume. According to Robert McChesney, “Corporate
Media and the Threat to Democracy,” there is a myth to the notion that
there is a free media that promotes a public discourse beyond market
consumption interest. According to
McChesney government has historically subsidized free media and that advertisers
played a small role in content selection. Key periods in our history first in
1875 and then in 1920 marked a period of rapid consolidation of free media
under a privatized oligopoly. This trend first developed in the 1840’s with
the rise of the first commercial newspapers. In 1875 Advertisers consolidated
the market and drove out the small independent newspapers. Journalism at this
time then came to reflect corporate profit producing interests of the owners
and advertisers. In the 1920’s when the first schools of journalism were
developed the key emphasis of objectivity and the desire to relate neutral
news hardly translated into reality of practice. Essentially McChesney argued that with the growth of corporate
commercial media, consumer wisdom and political views were transmuted by the
talking heads of popular media, who were just mouthpieces for work authority,
hence news and ideas became sound bytes of issueless nonsense. “Moreover the
rise of Corporate dominated capitalism in the 20th century has
seen a shift such that core political decisions concerning resource
allocation and affairs of state tend to be made by elites outside of public
purview and the political concentrates upon tangible or symbolic issues.”(McChesney,
15) Furthermore McChesney suggests that free market laisseve faire
economists are indifferent to this tide of events because in their view the
role of government should not extend beyond protection of private
property. “Free Market Conservatives
like Milton Friedman are unapologetic about this turn of events; in their
view the market [i.e., business] should rule and the political system should
logically deal with private property and not much else.”(16) McChesney describes the media as part of a joint monopoly
involving total ownership of media in 1985, at 50 firms, and then decreasing
in 1992, to 24 firms, indicating that global commercial media enterprise
today is far different then in its mercurial spawn under the ideological myth
of the free press. Major control of these firms was then officiated to the
super conglomerates, Disney, General Electric, Westinghouse, Viacom, CBS, and
Time Warner. According to George Gerbner the media, “Has nothing to tell, but
plenty to sell,” and that this growing commercialization of media was shaping
American conceptions of freedom, government, and societal ethic.(23) Both
authors define the media as a cartel organization interested in driving out
new sources of competition from entering the marketplace. Rather real news in
America today has been replaced by junk food news, i.e., “homogenization
of content and less risk taking.”(28)[19]
“The major function of non profit broadcasting in the United
States from 1920-1960 was in fact, to pioneer new sections of the
electromagnetic spectrum when the commercial interests did not yet view them
as profitable. Thus it was the educational broadcasters who played an
enormous role in developing AM broadcasting in the 1920’s and the FM radio
and even UHF television in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In each case, once it
became clear that money could be made, the educators were displaced and capitalists
seized the reins.”(39) The failed mergers of telecommunications companies and
subsequent market deregulation of AT&T, telecom-world com created a ‘Digital
What” faced response to the idea of digital democracy. The 1934 Communications
Act had originally mandated that the government regulate the mergers and
acquisitions of media company holdings when in interest of the public trust
media was subsumed to embody the role of the provider intercessor of public
and private opinion. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
and subsequent total deregulation of the media and energy market speeaks to
the economic gloom of the present state of free market capitalism. McCheseney argues that Corporate America promotes a theology
that assumes total infallibility of the market and a faith based stake in
capitalisims mythology of pure competition. The reality of such a democracy
assumes 1 dollar = 1 vote.
Assumptions of freedom of choice go out the window in that the market
does not give people what they want, rather, the market, “give[s]] the people
what they want within the range of what is most profitable to produce and or
in the political interests of the producers.”(46) This is inherently what
MCChesney describes as the trivialization and tabloidization of media content
by the corporate suppliers. According to McChesney, freedom as it exists today is in reality
a reflection, “..More broadly, the collapse of social democracy, had less to
with the weaknesses of socialism parse, as much as the inability of capitalism
to accommodate a powerful democratic public sector concerned as much with
common people as with business.”(52) The result of free market capitalism’s
merger mania in the 1980’s and 1990’s has resulted in the decrease in the
size of the US middle class and the loss of manufacturing jobs to corporate
centers of economic production in the third world. The pundits of the market according
to McChesney are often the self termed ‘liberal’ ‘ talking heads’ of the
intellectual and upper middle class who tout the virtues of globalisim and free
market capitalism at the expense of dispensing with what made their class ascension possible New
Deal social programs. Inherently, McChesney suggests that there is a myth to
the left wing media bias. Rather The majority of journalists that constitute this core of public
intelligentsia and the message provided is cloaked under the terms of
liberalisim, i.e., advocations of moral positions on civil and gender rights,
as being the sole ‘litmus test’ as what constitutes conservative and liberal
opinion. Despite these assumptions, ..”Often journalists have fairly
conservative positions on class
issues of trade, taxation and government social spending.”(55) Essentially,
these journalists are thoroughly committed to capitalism and existing social
relations. Furthermore, McChesney argues that the Media adopts Public
relations image as one of an ‘arrogant millionaire celebrity’ that claims to
speak on behalf of the public. “At
its worst the myth of the left wing media bias represents at worst,
conservative criticism that is a variant of traditional far right wing social
analysis that neglects the study of social institutions and attempts to identify
scapegoats to explain unsatisfactory performance.”(60) Inherently he argues
that this is the reason why conservative media critics want to cut funding
for public not for profit, non-commercial broadcasting. (64) In his conclusion, McChesney also notes that the demise of free media
has directly reflected the demise of union labor in this country as well as a
result of globalisim and industrial flight of corporations. He suggests that
globalized capitalism undermines the national sovereignty of governments and
individual freedom. “A main trend of global capitalism is that it undermines
not only national sovereignty, but also popular sovereignty as societies seem
compelled to obey the dictates of global markets or face stern economic
punishment.”(74) McChesney suggests that journalist have key power in shaping
public perceptions concerning government and the economy. Ideally, he argues
that Journalism should promote a balanced discourse between the public and
private spheres and that government should subsidize a public media sphere
and allow for dissemination of free and alternative opinions, to promote informed
civic virtue. Furthermore he favors a 1% tax on all advertisers to support
public broadcasting. *** Sut Jhally argues that the conceptions of freedom in this
society are induced as a result of media bribery. The argument follows that
media appeals to our most biological instincts, i.e., sex appeal or wish
fulfillment fetishes and associates those drives and helps the mind identify
needs and wants according to a particular product. For example an ice-cold
beer will get you laid and uplift your spirits too. The culture of advertising induces a false normality that is
taken as true reality. *** Conclusion Democracy in practice has only existed briefly before it was
undone by oligarchy just ask the ancient Athenians. The US committed itself to supporting autocratic regimes based
on vague geopolitical principals, of collective security. The rhetoric of
American foreign policy today touts the expansion of democratic principles
and yet its practice of doling out foreign aid is based more on the
horizontal integration of the world's economic wealth into the hands of the
power elite classes as opposed to actual infra-structural investment in a
third world country. Third World countries are designed more on the lines of
a mercantile system in which all domestic production in those countries is
geared for export. The poverty of
these nations fans the flames of nationalism and since dissent is not
tolerated in these countries it will always be the US who is viewed as the
sole aggressor and infidel. The more we retaliate and continue to prop up
despotic regimes just for the sake of extracting oil out of a country without
real regard as to the genuine welfare of the people whose natural resources
we exploit, the more we insure that the cycle of autocracy, poverty and
terrorism will come to be increasingly more visible in our own country. American Freedom can only be preserved by the resolute
willingness of its citizen’s to endow themselves with conscious choice and
freedom to take part in political action. The avenues of democratic
accountability, i.e., free press, and a vibrant economy must not be subsumed
to embody the rational totality of a few elites as the sole nurturing womb of
government, rather the latter has evolved from the stain of an older
authoritarian theocratic order, now extinguished by capitalism. The essence of Democratic virtue is to
promote pluralism. Since capitalism is inevitably the economic face of
modernity than to articulate its further evolution one should not subsume
that it is the guranteer of democracy.
Free markets today only favor resource acquisition in line with the
extraction principle of raw material capital at the expense of long term
sustainability in terms of cultural, economic and environmental impact of
resource depletion at the current level of capitalist rates of consumption.
Increasingly, these political and economic intangible ideologies blend
together forcing Americans to adopt pro-military intervention views regarding
the US militarily intervening in the political affairs of client producing
states to supposedly safeguard their economic happiness. The role of the military in a free republic
should not be subverted solely to the views of industrialists but should act
as the protector of the people and democracy first. The great movements for
freedom in the past gave us racial and gender suffrage however, we must not acquiesce
to the abysmal relativism of gradualism and forget to leave out the notion of
universal class suffrage and accountability of our government to the ideals
of American freedom it so chooses to qualify and cherish in the nature of
common freedom- a nation of common democratic free elect-we must seek to
forever redefine. *** |
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[1] “St. Thomas’s characterization of the desire for gain as turpitude (which term even included unavoidable and hence ethically justified profit-making) already contained a high degree of concession on the part of the Catholic doctrine to the financial powers with which the church had such intimate political relations in the Italian cities..”(Weber, 124) |
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[2] Max Weber on Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion – A selection of Texts – Edited in part newly translated by Stanislav Andreski – Professor of Sociology, University of Reading – London, Published by George Allen & Unwin |
[3] Please see Hume http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hume/treat.html for a general rendition of the colonial mindset, for a specific common approach see Paine http://www.bartleby.com/133/
[4] For corporations please see Dartmouth vs. Woodward
[5] http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0852911.html
[8] please see these two links: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufacturing_Consent.html
[9] For laws of search and seizure on open waterways: See Amistad supreme Court Case, 40 U.S. 518 (1841) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=40&invol=518
[10] also please see: equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment
[11] For a fascinating read on the nature of civil rights and contract law and their evolution in the western legal tradition check out this book: The State and Freedom of Contract url: http://www.independent.org/tii/content/pubs/review/books/tir51_scheiber2.html
[12] this law was later overturned by Yates v. United States (1957)
[14] “The Price of Free World Victory” (1942), “Economic Bill of Rights” (1944)
[15] For more information on the Cold War check out this site: http://geocities.com/s011023/coldwar.htm & on the middle east: http://geocities.com/s011023/middle_east_paper_roughdraft.html
[17]Herbert Marcuse: “One Dimensional Man” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/onedimen/marcuse.htm
[18] Betty friedan on the Feminist mystique: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sedm1657/friedan.html
By Carl Jensen, Founder and Director Emeritus, Project Censored, Sonoma State University, http://www.projectcensored.org/newsabuse.htm with Victoria Calkins, and research assistance by Amy Bonczewski