A Barb Wired Political-Mental Culture

America in Lockdown

by NORMAN POLLACK

Culture is conterminous with the life of a given social order, its various subsets nonetheless constituting a unified whole, as in the way political, economic, military, and ideological features mutually imbricate and thereby reinforce and strengthen one another: a structural integration which, as in the case of US capitalism, defines consistency of purpose in the shaping and behavior of institutions, even to the nitty-gritty of sports and popular music. Barbwire = lines drawn, of which: Stay inside, or get bloodied! To be “free” requires self-restraint, an internalized patriotism, so that capitalism emerges as an absolute good. And whatever supports it basks in its reflected (ideological) light, including, as needed, which is almost always, an aggressive military posture to enforce mental discipline and hierarchical class divisions at home and global market penetration abroad.

Fortress America, National Security State, names here are descriptive yet irrelevant because chameleon-like the societal formation presents itself both to itself and the world at large in salubrious terms hardly in keeping with reality. Democracy, rendered platitudinous, is at one with highest ever concentration of wealth and class dominance in America, a globalization of counterrevolution, and, through presidential whim, targeted assassination and, with carefully assembled True Believers, the pursuit of a Far Eastern policy framework designed to contain and isolate China and Russia while discouraging their alignment as an independent power center in world politics rivaling that of the United States. America becomes bare bones capitalism with a vengeance, the Lockean absolutism once described by Louis Hartz in his “Liberal Tradition in America,” as the absence of feudalism here clearing the path from the nation’s 17th century formative years to the unimpeded capitalistic institutions and values in the present and future, takes on a character less benign than he finds—the absolutism of the property right necessitating for its security, growth, and cultural saturation of the polity, domestic social control (including that of class relations) and militaristic expansion.

The result is American Exceptionalism, not however, Thoreauvian Nature or the Emersonian Oversoul, but quite prosaically, the fusion of capitalism and racism as twin pillars, actually, unitary foundation, of the American experience. Symbolically, John Locke meets John C. Calhoun, seeming historical opposites because of the latter’s fear of the former’s implicit dynamism (a difference that immediately melts away in their respective honoring of capital accumulation), yet bound together, as are the systems standing behind them, on the underlying accentuation of exploitation which would have made feudalism slightly dysfunctional. More to the point, capitalism’s central economic category is the COMMODITY, that which allows the treatment of human beings as factors of production and sources of profit—exactly what one finds in the system of plantation slavery, the slave no more, no less, than a commodity whose labor, like that of the factory worker, has exchange value, not use value, the human being thus emptied of human content.

Already the individual historically is ideologically-culturally-economically penned in, in an enclosure that places the individual at the mercy of the system, a system itself reified (accorded legitimacy and dignity as a materialized abstraction) and fully productive of false consciousness, the ideological glue holding it in place. Capitalism in America is given added weight through racism in the course of its development, because racism, with or without the presence of slavery, has endowed the social order with the theory and practice of HIERARCHY: class differentiation, graded statuses, each one’s socially defined place, all of which sanction relations of domination and subordination, the absence of which depriving capitalism of its salience as a societal framework of exploitation. In sum, the conterminous phenomenon may be seen less abstractly as the integrative mechanism shaping the structure of power, and culture therefore as the totalization of class power.

Our barb wired political-mental culture owes much of its longevity to the psychological interjection of the poisons of capitalism, not least the willingness to abide by the criterion of self-identity embodied in commodity production, in which, as Marx writes in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, we become animals in our human functions, humans in our animal functions, and not a complete, multidimensional person neither exploited nor driven by the spirit of accumulation and the treatment of others as well as ourselves as mere objects. The condition of existence in good standing in America is ALIENATION, from one’s self (so as not to recognize and admit the dehumanization occurring) and from all others, objects to be manipulated for gain, even including the family. One political expedient for the stabilization both of capitalism and racism has been to keep the populace jumping through the hoops of anticommunism, and now, counterterrorism. Yet, add to racism as an accelerant for hierarchy the looming presence of militarism, itself popularizing hierarchy and patriotism into a comparatively recent mental syndrome of self-incarceration in the enclosure of capitalist fulfillment. No longer need repression be the proverbial truncheon; even slavery was recognized finally as a brake on capitalist modernization and expansion and converted into racism pure and simple as a permanent element of the polity.

Anything for capitalism, its detractors systemically weeded out whether through consumerism, the siren song of liberalism, or, exigently, the use of force. Where is today’s Wobbly? We are governed by moral monsters who have chosen to make war and its (always) preparation the surrogate for and distraction from the endeavor to build toward human community in which social justice not only trumps but wipes out commodity fetishism and the solipsistic mindset. With each day, the current administration moves us away from our self-realization as cooperative human beings socially engaged in the betterment of all.

Norman Pollack has written on Populism. His interests are social theory and the structural analysis of capitalism and fascism. He can be reached at pollackn@msu.edu.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/18/america-in-lockdown/