Transcript: CHRIS HEDGES on Deflating the Ruling Elite through Civil Disobedience [ENCORE] /271
Ayana Young Welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Chris Hedges, originally aired in June of 2019.
Chris Hedges Finally, the end, it's about more than winning. It's about finding a life of meaning. It's about personal empowerment. It's about a public declaration that we will not live according to the dominant lie. It is a message to the elites that you do not own us. It's about defending our dignity, our self-respect, our agency, it's about freeing ourselves from fear.
Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Chris Hedges. Chris is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times bestseller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and has sold over 400,000 copies. He writes a weekly column for the website Truthdig and hosts a show, “On Contact,” on RT America. Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries during his work for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Well, hello, Chris. Thank you so much for joining us today. I just want to say before we begin that your work has been instrumental in my life, especially in my formative years, beginning at Occupy Wall Street, and it's really a manifestation-come-reality to be sharing this time with you.
Chris Hedges Thank you.
Ayana Young So I want to start this interview by diving right into the belly of the Trump beast. So conversations around Trump and the upcoming 2020 Elections are futile because our problem is not Trump. Our problem is neoliberalism's descent into fascism and the pervasiveness of corporate capitalism. To a great extent, it appears that the election of Donald Trump and our hyper-focus on him as an individual has purposefully thwarted all meaningful conversations on collapsing capitalism. So my question is, what is the relationship between neoliberalism's failing credibility and the calculated rise of Trump after nearly a decade of the liberal class slash Obama era functioning as a “safety valve in a time of crisis?”
Chris Hedges Well, that's precisely both the problem and the danger. It is the failure on the part of the liberal establishment to understand the social, political, and economic forces that gave rise to a figure like Trump. And it's not accidental that we see Trump-like figures arising throughout the industrialized world and even in countries like India, where global capitalists that perpetrate the reigning ideology of neoliberalism have in essence seized control of sovereign economies. And the inability on the part of the liberal elites to recognize and name the social inequality that they helped orchestrate, I find frightening because it fosters a nonreality based belief system, ie Trump is a product of Russian bots, or the Podesta emails, or Comey or whatever without addressing the core issue. And they engage in the same kind of demagoguery attacking Putin in the way that Trump will attack Muslims or undocumented immigrants, but they're both nonreality based belief systems, and that failure on the part of the liberal establishment to understand how we got here, and their role in how we got here. And their relentless personalizing of our decay in the figure of Trump means that the rupture of the social bonds that have been caused by deindustrialization, and austerity, and neoliberalism that gave rise to a demagogue like Trump aren't, are not going to be fixed. We're not going to deal with the fundamental issue that has distorted our democracy, and we're not going to reverse the corporate coup d'etat that's taken place. And therefore, things are only going to get worse because first of all, we're headed towards another financial crisis (even the New York Times is writing this) but we're also barreling towards catastrophic climate disruption. And so I find this inability on the part of the mainstream establishment, to name and address the real problems, really scary.
Ayana Young Thank you for being so blunt with your response. It's really helpful to hear truth in these times when there's so much misinformation and myths swirling around in the media. And I remember you said that a revolution is not possible in the span of an election cycle. But I can't help but wonder about whether or not there is even hope for reviving democracy at this point. Do you think this is possible through the election of grassroots leaders?
Chris Hedges No. I'm not opposed to the election of grassroots leaders, but they will be utterly ineffectual until we build powerful movements that put pressure on the centers of power. And history bears this out. Obviously, we want politicians or elected officials who are more enlightened than most of those who hold office but nothing will change until we organize and carry out sustain acts of civil disobedience, whether that's around issues of labor, or around establishing a rational policy to deal with the climate crisis (which means the halting of all carbon emissions by 2025 at the latest). And there are groups, in particular, Extinction Rebellion in Britain, that I think have figured this out pretty well. And they, of course, blocked the many of the roundabouts and roads and bridges in London and have called for sustained, non-violent acts of civil disobedience in capitals around the world to reverse what they call “our one-way track to extinction.” But they're right, this is the only mechanism we have left and we better start employing it very soon. To somehow think that electing a progressive or a liberal politician is going to deal with the gravity of the crisis before us is naive.
Ayana Young Now, I know much of your work emphasizes how neoliberalism is a calculated project necessitated by corporate capitalism. It was never intended to be a rational project. It was intended to solidify class power. In a recent article of yours published on Truthdig, you quote David Harvey, who says, “it's important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty. Workers were well organized and were beginning to push back. Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas.” Harvey clarifies that neoliberalism was so successful amongst the emerging generation of the time because it appealed to a broader cultural desire for freedom. But instead of acknowledging that desire in context of social justice or change, the capitalist class channeled it into the marketplace. So do you think this message has stayed the same today? Or has it adapted to the wants and needs of this generation? Like how we've been duped again, through say, the notion that the gig economy is our generation's entrepreneurial saving grace.
Chris Hedges Right, well, the gig economy is part of the con: what the gig economy is is just a new name for temporary contract employment with no benefits and no job security. Yeah, Harvey's right. I like his book on neoliberalism, which was written a while ago, but I think it's probably the best explanation of neoliberalism and how it functions as an ideology. It was designed by the ruling elites, after the 1960s, to cope with what the political scientist, Samuel Huntington, called our excess of democracy as an economic theory; it was always an absurdity. It drew from these very marginal, discredited figures, like Friedrich Hyack. I mean, they'd even go around and quote the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman - it never made any economic sense. But it was used as an ideology to discredit mainstream Keynesian economists within the academy, within the IMF, the World Bank, and within government, and sold to the media, and essentially as an ideology was promoted to carry out deregulation, the destruction of labor unions, government oversight, austerity - and you're right, it was conflated as with freedom. And that's, of course, after the revolutions in Eastern Europe, which freed themselves from communist control, the neoliberal economists from the Chicago school came in and gave them the same talk that freedom of the market was about individual liberty and freedom of choice. And, of course, what it really was about, which we are now experiencing, is corporate tyranny.
And I think that what we're seeing at this moment in history is what Gramsci would call the interregnum. And that is when the ruling ideology has lost its credibility and no longer has any currency across the political spectrum on the right or the left. Remember, Donald Trump was running around, saying he wouldn't take money from Goldman Sachs. And that is a very dangerous moment for the ruling elites because once a population no longer buys or believes in the ideology that justifies the ruling elite, then the institutions that buttress the ruling class inevitably begin to deflate and ultimately collapse. And that's what we're watching now with the Trump presidency. So at that moment, and Alexander Berkman writes about this in his essay, The Idea is the Thing, you have a battle of ideas that begins to percolate almost below the surface. And it's a battle that the corporate state is losing. And that's why they are becoming much more draconian in terms of their control: they're turning more to coercion. But we haven't yet, I think, articulated an alternative vision. And so there is political ferment within the United States as the ruling ideology loses credibility. But as long as the ideas that are rising to take its place are inchoate, the state can maintain power. Otherwise, opposition is just chaotic or even anarchic. And I think that's where we are. We're struggling to articulate a new vision but we all have recognized that the ideology that's peddled by the ruling classes is a con. And I think that that comes from every aspect of the political spectrum.
Ayana Young Now, I want to expand a little bit further into this conversation on the gig economy. Because I know so many are forced to hold multiple low-paying, part-time jobs in all sectors that are totally devoid of security and growth are benefits. And it's perhaps one of the most glaring examples of wealth inequality in today's society when an Uber driver in Detroit makes around $9 an hour while the fortune CEO and co-founder of Uber has a net worth of $4 billion. So what is the fate of the working class? Should we continue to buy into the gig economy as a functional system? And I wanted to also mention this quote that American productivity, as the New York Times pointed out, has increased 77% since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12%. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now. So how do we shatter through this fantasy of the gig economy and see it for what it really is?
Chris Hedges Right, well, it's just a form of neo-feudalism. Because you're not protected by labor laws, you're often working for the minimum wage or below the minimum wage, you don't get benefits, you don't have job security. And these companies are unregulated. This is how Bezos, the head of Amazon, becomes worth $140 billion and you have people working in these 12-hour shifts, living in camper vans, often who are elderly because they'll hire the elderly who've lost their homes. There was a book about this called Nomadland, that was pretty good. So that's the gig economy. I mean, look, they've always got some term to kind of sell you on the very old system of the abuse of labor. And you can see in all of these enterprises, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Uber, whatever it is, that these workers are totally stressed out, have no protection. You know, for instance, if they're injured, if you're injured while working in an Amazon warehouse, before you leave you have to sign a document that says that the injury was not work-related. And it's Jessica Bruder who wrote Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century. She does a really good job of just painting what the conditions are like in this gig economy in these warehouses where you get a job for a few months, and then suddenly you're tossed out - oftentimes with disabilities or injuries - and then you can wait months before you find something else. So yeah, the gig economy is a sham. But of course, these corporations invest quite a bit of money in terms of romanticizing it and selling it to us.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. Yeah, I see it growing more and more and constantly get ads for these types of live work, always work, but somehow it's creative. Like you're in creative control or something.
Chris Hedges We should be clear that with the gig economy, those sectors, you see it in the taxicab industry in New York, that those sectors of the economy that were once organized are destroyed. And that's why you have all these taxi cab drivers in New York committing suicide. Because Uber is taking their business and they are regulated. The yellow cabs are limited in terms of numbers, they have to adhere to safety codes, a lot of the drivers are in unions, and they have to buy medallions which are quite expensive but have dropped in value. So what you're doing is unleashing desperate drivers onto the streets, who are pushing rates below operating costs, and forcing professional cab drivers out of business and that's what the gig economy does. So suddenly, in order to survive, you're working 100 or 120 hours a week and it's brutal. And it's making, as you pointed out, figures like the CEO of Uber extremely rich (worth $4.8 billion), or Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million while the serfs who work for them are living in tremendous distress: that's what the gig economy is.
Ayana Young Now as a war correspondent, I know you are much more familiar with both the concept and reality of war. Something that I often think about is how disconcerting it is that the vast majority of us really have no idea about the armed conflicts the United States is currently involved in. And while the White House is required to update Congress every six months on where the US is using military force, this is barely given coverage in the media. Rarely do we hear about our current military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, or Yemen. And so while I'm interested in sort of looking at the bigger picture surrounding these, “American-led interventions,” I'd also like to have a conversation on how these practices will inevitably turn inwards at some point. I think of Aimé Césaire saying “What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.” So how can we apply this sort of understanding to the rise of American mercenaries and private contractors? And maybe to take it a step further, I'm wondering what kind of threats to the public to private military companies, like Academy, pose during natural disasters, which are inevitable to happen?
Chris Hedges Right, well, that's part of the whole neoliberal project, which is to privatize every aspect of government. And if you look at Karl Marx's description of what he defines as late capitalism, what he says is that capitalists entities unable to achieve the kind of profits that they had in the past because they have impoverished the consumer base, as has happened in the United States, inevitably turns on the very institutions that sustain a capitalist society and cannibalize them. And that's, of course, what we're seeing across the board. That's what the privatization of education is about; 70% of our intelligence is done by private firms like Bose Allen Hamilton (99% of Bose Allen Hamilton's budget comes from the federal government) and that's also true with military contractors. It was interesting, I was reading the other day about the casualty rates in the war in Afghanistan, now the longest war in US history 18 years, and the casualty rates are actually higher for contractors than they are for soldiers and marines. So every aspect is being privatized.
If you look at the book that I just wrote, America: The Farewell Tour, I opened it in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the city is, in essence, struggling not to go bankrupt. And it's reduced all of its municipal employees, including the mayor, to minimum wage. But in order to save itself, it had lost I think 40% or something of its city pension funds because of the financial fraud of 2008 - nobody's bailing them out, of course. But what it is doing is selling off what few assets it has left. So it's selling off the sewer system, it's the utility system, the parking authority, and private corporations are buying up those utilities and jacking up the rates. So you asked about private contractors, that's part of this much wider privatization of public institutions so that corporate entities can extract this money, and that, at least according to Marx, is an indicator of kind of the twilight stage of the capitalist state, because in essence, they're hollowing these institutions out from the inside. You see it in the prisons (though, it's not just that we have private prisons), it's that every function within a prison a state or federal prison is being privatized, the money transfer service: JPay, the telephone service, the Global Tel Link, the foodservice, Aramark, the medical services, the commerce, it's all privatized, it's now a multi-billion dollar industry, so unable to extract the kinds of profits because they've destroyed the middle class, and dispossessed the working class, which has very little disposable income. And in fact, the only way they extract money from them is through debt peonage by forcing them into debt. They eat away at the very institutions that make the system possible. And that's true in the military as it is in almost every other aspect of public life.
Ayana Young I'm really interested in asking a question about how our internal controls are based off our actions and military interventions abroad. Especially thinking about this with the news from Haiti last week of several Americans who were previously in the Navy Seal, are employed by Blackwater in the US’s Diplomatic Security Service, were found in Haiti on a “government mission, armed with rifles, drones, and pistols, driving around in an unmarked car.” And this just happens to be happening right as protests are mounting in Haiti, as their president refuses to step down.
Chris Hedges Yeah, that's there's a kind of fusion between corporate power and government power. So you know, if you go back to Occupy, it came out, I think it was in the New York Times, that there was a kind of command center set up by the New York City police department that was jointly run with corporate security. I mean, Cornel West and I did a people's hearing of Goldman Sachs in Zuccotti Park, and then several of us marched on Goldman Sachs to shut it down and we were arrested. But what was interesting is that during the arrests there was no differentiation between the Goldman Sachs security and the NYPD, many of the people being formerly police officers, or from the security apparatus, or the military apparatus. And so the incident that you just described is an example of this, the blurring of the lines between the security services of corporations and the security services of the state and that's very dangerous.
I mean, the fact that 70% of intelligence work is carried out by private corporations means that those corporations are hardly limiting their surveillance and monitoring of American citizens to solely government issues. We know that corporations follow quite closely activists and dissidents, and use the same tools that the state uses to do so because they often administer those tools for the state.
Ayana Young Thank you for going into that detail. Chris. It's really scary to hear about the privatization of the military abroad and here, but it's so important for us to be aware of, so thank you for that.
I'd like to move on to another topic. And as I understand it, both neoliberalism and Christianity are equally susceptible to fascism at this point in time, and to some extent, it's largely inevitable. But I'm curious to learn more about how the rise of religious fundamentalism coincides with the ruling of corporate forces and the elite. And additionally, how is the Christian right emboldened by the left's failure to address the ills of American society?
Chris Hedges So I wrote a book 10 years ago called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. And I didn't use the word fascist lightly. I'm a seminary graduate, my father was a minister, my mother was a seminary graduate. So I grew up in a religious tradition. These people are Christian heretics, they have perverted and deformed the Christian religion to acculturate with the worst aspects of capitalism, and American imperialism, and white supremacy. The mega-churches function like little tiny dictatorships invariably run by white men who prey on the despair of those people in those churches to become quite wealthy, and that they're very similar to Trump. And in the book, and I spent two years on it, and I spent a lot of time in these churches and in creationist seminars and pro-life retreats, etc. It's clear that the deindustrialization and economic stagnation and despair that has gripped, in this case in particular, the white working class, has pushed him into the arms of the charlatans and they have embraced this magical thinking, magical Jesus who watches out for them and is going to reward them, and make them wealthy, and protect them, and cure them of cancer, etc. because the real world just crushed them.
And I couldn't… you'd have to be heartless not to feel a great deal of empathy for what (I think the movement is dangerous) but what the followers went through. Constant stories of sexual and domestic abuse, and a struggle with addictions including opioids, evictions, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness. And finally, they couldn't deal with the reality-based world and they were captured by those peddling this form of magical thinking. And part of the deep hostility they have to those of us who remain rooted in a world of science and verifiable fact is that they're terrified of being pushed back into this world that almost destroyed them.
I was in Detroit for the book with Tim LaHaye, who wrote the End Time series, and there were these gruesome descriptions (none of which are in the Bible, the rapture is not even in the Bible), gruesome descriptions of the end times, and how non-believers would their blood would boil and their eyes would pop up. It was quite graphic. And I realized, I think, sitting there that part of their lust for the apocalypse and these apocalyptic stories, is that finally that world out there that almost crushed them is destroyed.
And so you ask how neoliberalism? Well, when you distort a society to the extent that ours has been distorted, when people have feelings of entrapment and rage, then inevitably you give rise to movements. I mean, Hannah Arendt writes, all totalitarian movements peddle their own form of magical thinking, and that's what's happened. It's been given the veneer of Christianity, this Christianized fascism, and it is organized quite effectively through mega-churches, and Liberty University, and Patrick Henry Law School, and this huge radio and television empire. And what we're watching, it's filling the ideological vacuum of Donald Trump because Trump has no real ideology. But the Christian fascists, they've been organizing and preparing now for power for decades. So what I fear is another economic collapse, which I think is inevitable, or maybe another catastrophic terrorist attack, or a new war, or another climate catastrophe. Usually, economic dislocation or crisis is what brings these people to power but they're ready. And of course, as Noam Chomsky points out, you can get rid of Trump but because Michael Pence comes out of this Christianized fascism, Chomsky argues I think correctly, it'll be worse.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. I think about this magical thinking. Another word for it that I've used is the ‘prosperity gospel,’ which is what I've seen a lot in mega churches. This idea that Jesus wants you to have a new Cadillac, Jesus wants you to have, you know, that four-bedroom house and the two-car garage… and if you just keep following this path, then you will be rewarded with these materials goods. And I do think it makes sense when people have been up against so much hardship that they are looking for a way out. And they do want the system that has oppressed them to collapse. And I know that it's been suggested that one way to curb the rise of Christian fanaticism is to reintegrate disenfranchised right-wing communities back into the economic system.
Chris Hedges That's how I conclude my book. I mean, I said, the only way you're going to break this movement is to reintegrate them into the economy. Trying to argue them out of creationism isn't going to work.
Ayana Young But what exactly does this mean when our economic system is clearly broken and the dollar might implode altogether in the next decade or so, or you know, the next economic crash will happen?
Chris Hedges Well, that means they'll be empowered even further and become more fanatic. So I mean this is, you know, the Nazis… and I'm not telling you Trump is Hitler or the Christian right are Nazis, but we do learn from history. So the Nazis are polling in the single digits in 1928 and then you have the 1929 crash. And you have Ebert and the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic imposing draconian forms of austerity, including abolishing unemployment insurance, and the Nazis' popularity explodes. So, the danger is that the longer the liberal elites remain ineffectual, and refuse to address in a meaningful way the root causes behind the disintegration within society, the more these fanatics and charlatans and con artists and demagogues are empowered. And I watched that in Yugoslavia with the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and you vomited up figures like Radovan Karadžić, and Slobodan Milošević, and Franjo Tuđman for the same reason.
Ayana Young So by welcoming them back into the economic system, meaning into a unionized economic system, or maybe the economic system of our dreams… something that isn't so - gosh just - corrupted. Because I'm wondering if welcoming them back into a corrupted economic system, how does that support the health of our societies, or what… I don't know if I'm just kind of looking for the devil in the details here.
Chris Hedges Well, but you can't welcome them back into a system that doesn't give them economic stability and a sense that they can find a place within society, and that the society is a form of meritocracy. In essence, it really boils down to having a sense of hope. I mean, I covered Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo agreement, and Rabin understood number one, that the occupation was poisonous to Israel itself. But also more importantly, that if the Palestinians had a stake in the Israeli economy, if Ahmed could find a good job in Tel Aviv and go back and buy a refrigerator in Gaza for his family, and send his kids to school, you would do far more to mitigate fanaticism and even terrorism. And that's correct. So, if we don't pretty radically reconfigure the economy into a form of socialism that protects and provides services to the working class and the working poor, then these problems will only get worse. You know, all of the theorists of revolution have been quite clear about what it is that causes a revolution. Crane Brinton: The Anatomy of a Revolution is one of the best books on this, but one of the most important elements is a sense that you can find a place within the society where you have the possibility of advancement, and when that is taken away from you, and when you know it's taken away from your children, then this creates huge distortions that give rise to these kinds of radical or fanatical movements that we're seeing within the United States.
Ayana Young Now the next question that I want to ask is really very deep in my own personal life right now, especially as I'm analyzing movements and millennials’ involvement in them. And we've spoken about the rise of the Christian right, but I'd also like to look at the opposite side of the coin. Now reflecting on your own religious identity and the radical teachings of Christ, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on religion and spirituality as a moral compass and means of accountability. And I asked this question, thinking about those of us who had been raised in secular households or cling to the titles of agnostic or atheist as identities, but then find ourselves without faith in a world that has reinforced individualistic and capitalistic behaviors. So I'm wondering, do you think we need a religious or spiritual background as we navigate these very tragic times? And if so, what must our religious or spiritual beliefs be grounded in?
Chris Hedges So we do have to distinguish between the institution, religious institutions, and what it means to have religious faith. Because all institutions as the theologian Paul Tillich wrote, are inherently demonic, including the church. And we see that with the abuse of power in the pedophilia within the Catholic Church, but the Catholic Church is not alone. So, yes, we need an element of faith, not necessarily grounded in any religious orthodoxy. I asked Daniel Barragan, the great radical priest, once how he defined faith, and he said, it was the belief that the good draws to it the good, even if empirically all the evidence around you proves otherwise: that that's ultimately what faith is.
And I think that we need to have a vision of a just society, which may be impossible, it may be completely unattainable, but we hold it before us as a kind of goal. And we strive towards it. I mean, Max Vabre wrote the great essay, Politics as a Vocation. In it, he argued that one had to be constantly vigilant against power. That as soon as movements achieved or built a more equitable society, ruling elites would begin to work assiduously to dismantle whatever gains have been made, that it was a constant struggle. And I think that act of resistance itself is in many ways, at least for me, empowering, especially those of us who follow the climate catastrophe. To do so without resisting just increases our despondency in our feelings of helplessness, even paralysis, and that by acting out, by saying no, by pushing back against - I mean, I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I talk about the fossil fuel industry in these corporations - pushing back against this culture of death and this the bleakness because we've already done so much to destroy the ecosystem. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, climate disruption will be catastrophic.
Finally, in the end, it's about more than winning; it's about finding a life of meaning. It's about personal empowerment. It's about a public declaration that we will not live according to the dominant lie. It is a message to the elites that you do not own us. It's about defending our dignity, our self-respect, our agency, it's about freeing ourselves from fear. And when you rise up to resist, and I experienced this as a war correspondent when I documented the crimes against humanity and the atrocities in numerous wars around the country, to shame the killers you experience a kind of euphoria even. You certainly obliterate that despair. And that sense of lethargy and acts of defiance, even if, in the ultimate sense, you're not victorious. And you do that as a group. You find solidarity, the courage itself is contagious, it sparks others to act and even revolt. And I think that, in the end, that resistance, which I see as a form of faith because it's built on perhaps an unachievable vision is now given what has arrayed against us the only force that will allow us to remain psychologically whole. It's also, acts of sustained mass civil disobedience is the only mechanism we have left. And it's a slim one to prevent the wholesale extinction of the human race.
Ayana Young Thank you, Chris, for being so direct with us. And I absolutely agree on the power and potency of civil disobedience, especially during this time. Now, I'd like to move on to a question around poverty. And I know that being poor in this country is not only incredibly expensive to the individual but it's ultimately living a life that's in constant crisis. So I'd like to ask you to speak both to the long term effects of poverty on the individual and collective level, as well as the simultaneous criminalization of poverty that has taken place over the years in relationship to the time you've spent in places like Camden, New Jersey, West Virginia, and the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation.
Chris Hedges Well, I mean, Barbara Ehrenreich book, Nickel and Dimed, I've always liked - I mean, she… nobody works harder in this country than the poor. They're often working three jobs 70/80 hours a week and these are jobs that are physically very punishing. Indeed, in the end of the book, I think she's at this point working at Walmart, Ehrenreich just walks out. You're sleeping in your car, you're in constant stress because if your car breaks down, you can't get to work, you can't pay your rent. I mean, it's as she says, being poor in America is one long emergency. And that, coupled with deindustrialization, has left huge segments of the American population desperate. By taking away industrial jobs especially in the inner city, you have created huge pools of what Karl Marx would call redundant or surplus labor, and then you need forms of social control because there are no jobs. That's how you get an explosion of the mass incarceration system under Clinton, at the same time that of course, he's pushing through NAFTA. That's how you get militarized police who kill primarily poor people of color with impunity: almost all of them are unarmed. That's how you get wholesale surveillance.
I mean, what we've created now and these, what Malcolm X used to call these internal colonies, are really miny police states where militarized police use terror to maintain control. Because you have shunted aside such large segments of the population, that if you didn't have the mechanisms of mass incarceration, militarized police, and I should mention evictions because, on the average, every six months, families, usually single women with children are being evicted so you can never create any sense of community or solidarity or network to resist. These are all by design, and the whole program of austerity and the two-tier legal system, where those who commit financial fraud and crimes at the highest levels never go to prison, whereas because of budget shortfalls like in St. Louis County where Ferguson is, about 30% of your budget is made up of fines. So they just invent fines. You know open carry fines, not mowing your lawn, there's a fine called obstructing pedestrian traffic, which means standing on a sidewalk, Eric Garner is choked to death for supposedly selling loose cigarettes, which is a crime, although he wasn't selling loose cigarettes.
So you have the elites, in essence, at this point orchestrated a tax boycott, Amazon didn’t pay taxes last year, Bank of America don't pay taxes, Donald Trump probably didn't pay taxes. And you take it out on the poorest sections of society and put them into a position where in order for them to ensure their own survival, they engage in activity that has been criminalized. And of course, the prison system is part of that process. So you know, Black and brown bodies on the streets of these blighted urban communities don't produce revenue for corporations but if you put them in a cage, they produce 50 or $60,000 a year. So this is part of the constant economic as well as state oppression that is making life more and more unendurable for the poor.
Ayana Young Wow, what you were describing is just disgusting. To see the discrepancies and criminalization between the white-collar and people just trying to get by. It seems like so many of us are trying to fight this thrashing and abhorrent system, or at the very least, are acknowledging the monstrosity of it, but I think many of us fail to recognize that we are brought up within this system that we think within capitalism and supremacy, whether we like it or not. And this is where I think we see the left engage with issues around identity politics, or multiculturalism, instead of tackling the larger frameworks at play. So as somebody who has witnessed decline and resistance globally, I'm really curious on what you see are the most effective ways to strategize and mobilize. Why is it so important that we implement intersectional resistance and begin to think in revolutionary terms, rather than representational?
Chris Hedges Well, because the whole nature of identity politics is a game played by the elites. So you know, you have the first woman running for president, or you have an African American president, this is just branding because they're still serving these oppressive economic structures. You see it within institutions, academic institutions, and identity politics, multiculturalism (and I'm not against any of this, I mean, we need these people to be empowered) masquerade as politics, they don't address the rising social inequality, they don't address the unchecked militarism. They don't address the evisceration of civil liberties, or the omnipotence of the security and surveillance apparatus. Corporate capitalism is not going to be reformed. Although it's constantly rebranding itself, it has to be destroyed. And the longer that the left or the liberal classes seek to work within this system, by beautifying it with people of color or whatever, women, that the system can absorb it, it doesn't affect the system. And that noose will still continue to be tightened around our necks.
We either rise up to bring these government and financial systems under public control, and that means nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, or will be its victims. And I think that identity politics and multiculturalism have been used quite effectively by the forces of oppression as a kind of cover to continue out the activity that they do. You know, there's a huge difference between Thurgood Marshall who was real and courageous and Clarence Thomas. Yeah, they're both Black. And so I think oftentimes we hear, you know, how many women are in the house, which is great. I'm glad that there are a lot of women in the House of Representatives. But how many of them (I think it's 25%) come out of the security state, or the military, how many of them espoused neoliberalism? How many of them are bought off by corporations? That's the more important question. So yes, we certainly need to elevate and amplify those voices that have traditionally been marginalized. But this has to be accompanied with a fierce commitment to destroy corporate power.
Ayana Young And is that where civil disobedience then fits in?
Chris Hedges That's all we have left. We don't live in a functioning democracy anymore. So what Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism, either we rebuild movements and carry out militant acts of sustained civil disobedience, or, I mean, we talk about climate that alone we're finished. I'm not naive enough to tell you it's going to work. But it is the only mechanism we have left to save ourselves.
Ayana Young And civil disobedience isn't just showing up to a protest. It's not just going with your signs. That's not civil disobedience. Correct.
Chris Hedges Civil disobedience means breaking the law, means disrupting the system, non-cooperation. It's like Extinction Rebellion, shutting down capital cities. We don't do civil disobedience on their terms. We do it on ours. So I did the climate, I called the march to nowhere, before the climate summit in New York, and everybody peacefully marched between barriers set up by the New York City Police, to the West Side Highway, which is on the opposite side of the UN, that's not going to work.
Ayana Young But we actually have to organize together and create movements that are willing to break the law - more of us, not just put a few leaders out - but actually everybody stand behind each other and get real, like actually cause a ruckus, because I do see that a lot. I mean, not that I'm against… I think organizing for marches, it's important, and it's a good place for people to get together and get to know each other. But I don't see it actually moving the needle anywhere and with all the resources it takes to have the Women's March and the Climate March. But what's actually happening from them is not civil disobedience. It's just like a photo op.
Chris Hedges They make people feel good. I mean, you want an example of what's real it’s Standing Rock, which was led by indigenous communities and had a deep spiritual element that we need.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was from Charlie Parr. I'd like to thank our podcast production team, our podcast audio producer Andrew Storrs, Francesca Glaspell, our media researcher and writer, Aaron Wise, social media coordination, Hannah Wilton, guest coordination, and Carter Lou McElroy, our music coordinator.