Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy
C.J. Hopkins 
Back in October of 2016, I wrote a somewhat divisive essay
in which I suggested that political dissent is being systematically
pathologized. In fact, this process has been ongoing for decades, but it
has been significantly accelerated since the Brexit referendum and the
Rise of Trump (or, rather, the Fall of Hillary Clinton, as it was
Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for eight more years of corporatocracy
with a sugar coating of identity politics, and not their enthusiasm for
Trump, that mostly put the clown in office.)
In
the twelve months since I wrote that piece, we have been subjected to a
concerted campaign of corporate media propaganda for which there is no
historical precedent. Virtually every major organ of the Western media
apparatus (the most powerful propaganda machine in the annals of
powerful propaganda machines) has been relentlessly churning out
variations on a new official ideological narrative designed to generate
and enforce conformity. The gist of this propaganda campaign is that
“Western democracy” is under attack by a confederacy of Russians and
white supremacists, as well as “the terrorists” and other “extremists”
it’s been under attack by for the last sixteen years.
I’ve
been writing about this campaign for a year now, so I’m not going to
rehash all the details. Suffice to say we’ve gone from Russian operatives hacking the American elections
to “Russia-linked” persons “apparently” setting up “illegitimate”
Facebook accounts, “likely operated out of Russia,” and publishing ads
that are “indistinguishable from legitimate political speech” on the Internet. This is what the corporate media is presenting as evidence of “an unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy,”
a handful of political ads on Facebook. In addition to the Russian
hacker propaganda, since August, we have also been treated to relentless
white supremacist hysteria and daily reminders from the corporate media that “white nationalism is destroying the West.”
The negligible American neo-Nazi subculture has been blown up into a
biblical Behemoth inexorably slouching its way towards the White House
to officially launch the Trumpian Reich.
At
the same time, government and corporate entities have been aggressively
restricting (and in many cases eliminating) fundamental civil liberties
such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of
assembly, the right to privacy, and the right to due process under the
law. The justification for this curtailment of rights (which started in
earnest in 2001, following the September 11 attacks) is protecting the
public from the threat of “terrorism,” which apparently shows no signs
of abating. As of now, the United States has been in a State of Emergency for over sixteen years. The UK is in a virtual State of Emergency. France is now in the process of enshrining its permanent State of Emergency into law. Draconian counter-terrorism measures have been implemented throughout the EU. Not just the notorious American police but police throughout the West have been militarized. Every other day we learn of some new emergency security measure designed to keep us safe from “the terrorists,” the “lone wolf shooters,” and other “extremists.”
Conveniently,
since the Brexit referendum and unexpected election of Trump (which is
when the capitalist ruling classes first recognized that they had a
widespread nationalist backlash on their hands), the definition of
“terrorism” (or, more broadly, “extremism”) has been expanded to include
not just Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or whoever we’re calling “the terrorists”
these days, but anyone else the ruling classes decide they need to label
“extremists.” The FBI has designated Black Lives Matter “Black Identity Extremists.” The FBI and the DHS have designated Antifa “domestic terrorists.” Hosting corporations have shut down several white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, along with their access to online fundraising. Google is algorithmically burying leftist news and opinion sources
such as Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, and
Truthout, among others. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have teamed up to cleanse the Internet of “extremist content,”
“hate speech,” and whatever else they arbitrarily decide is
inappropriate. YouTube, with assistance from the ADL (which deems
pro-Palestinian activists and other critics of Israel “extremists”) is censoring “extremist” and “controversial” videos, in an effort to “fight terrorist content online.” Facebook is also collaborating with Israel to thwart “extremism,” “incitement of violence,” and whatever else Israel decides is “inflammatory.” In the UK, simply reading “terrorist content” is punishable by fifteen years in prison. Over three thousand people were arrested last year for publishing “offensive” and “menacing” material.
Whatever
your opinion of these organizations and “extremist” persons is beside
the point. I’m not a big fan of neo-Nazis, personally, but neither am I a
fan of Antifa. I don’t have much use for conspiracy theories, or a lot
of the nonsense one finds on the Internet, but I consume a fair amount
of alternative media, and I publish in CounterPunch, The Unz Review,
ColdType, and other non-corporate journals. I consider myself a leftist,
basically, but my political essays are often reposted by right-wing
and, yes, even pro-Russia blogs. I get mail from former Sanders
supporters, Trump supporters, anarchists, socialists, former 1960s
radicals, anti-Semites, and other human beings, some of whom I
passionately agree with, others of whom I passionately disagree with. As
far as I can tell from the emails, none of these readers voted for
Clinton, or Macron, or supported the TPP, or the debt-enslavement and
looting of Greece, or the ongoing restructuring of the Greater Middle
East (and all the lovely knock-on effects that has brought us), or
believe that Trump is a Russian operative, or that Obama is Martin
Luther Jesus-on-a-stick. What they share, despite their opposing views,
is a general awareness that the locus of power in our post-Cold War age
is primarily corporate, or global capitalist, and neoliberal in nature.
They also recognize that they are being subjected to a massive
propaganda campaign designed to lump them all together (again, despite
their opposing views) into an intentionally vague and undefinable
category comprising anyone and everyone, everywhere, opposing the
hegemony of global capitalism, and its non-ideological ideology (the
nature of which I’ll get into in a moment).
As
I wrote in that essay a year ago, “a line is being drawn in the
ideological sand.” This line cuts across both Left and Right, dividing
what the capitalist ruling classes designate “normal” from what they
label “extremist.” The traditional ideological paradigm, Left versus Right, is disappearing (except as a kind of minstrel show), and is being replaced, or overwritten, by a pathological paradigm based upon the concept of “extremism.”
* * *
Although
the term has been around since the Fifth Century BC, the concept of
“extremism” as we know it today developed in the late Twentieth Century
and has come into vogue in the last three decades. During the Cold War,
the preferred exonymics were “subversive,” “radical,” or just plain old
“communist,” all of which terms referred to an actual ideological
adversary. In the early 1990s, as the U.S.S.R. disintegrated, and
globalized Western capitalism became the unrivaled global-hegemonic
ideological system that it is today, a new concept was needed to
represent the official enemy and its ideology. The concept of
“extremism” does that perfectly, as it connotes, not an external enemy
with a definable ideological goal, but rather, a deviation from the
norm. The nature of the deviation (e.g., right-wing, left-wing,
faith-based, and so on) is secondary, almost incidental. The deviation
itself is the point. The “terrorist,” the “extremist,” the “white
supremacist,” the “religious fanatic,” the “violent anarchist” … these
figures are not rational actors whose ideas we need to intellectually
engage with in order to debate or debunk. They are pathological
deviations, mutant cells within the body of “normality,” which we need
to identify and eliminate, not for ideological reasons, but purely in
order to maintain “security.”
A
truly global-hegemonic system like contemporary global capitalism (the
first of this kind in human history), technically, has no ideology.
“Normality” is its ideology … an ideology which erases itself and
substitutes the concept of what’s “normal,” or, in other words, “just
the way it is.” The specific characteristics of “normality,” although
not quite arbitrary, are ever-changing. In the West, for example, thirty
years ago, smoking was normal. Now, it’s abnormal. Being gay was
abnormal. Now, it’s normal. Being transgender is becoming normal,
although we’re still in the early stages of the process. Racism has
become abnormal. Body hair is currently abnormal. Walking down the
street in a semi-fugue state robotically thumbing the screen of a
smartphone that you just finished thumbing a minute ago is “normal.”
Capitalism has no qualms with these constant revisions to what is
considered normal, because none of them are threats to capitalism. On
the contrary, as far as values are concerned, the more flexible and
commodifiable the better.
See,
despite what intersectionalists will tell you, capitalism has no
interest in racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, or any other
despotic values (though it has no problem working with these values when
they serve its broader strategic purposes). Capitalism is an economic
system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one
fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least
not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human
culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist
society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every
concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear …
no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of
value.
Yes,
we all want there to be other values, and we pretend there are, but
there aren’t, not really. Although we’re free to enjoy parochial
subcultures based on alternative values (i.e., religious bodies, the
arts, and so on), these subcultures operate within capitalist society,
and ultimately conform to its rules. In the arts, for example, works are
either commercial products, like any other commodity, or they are
subsidized by what could be called “the simulated aristocracy,” the ivy
league-educated leisure classes (and lower class artists aspiring
thereto) who need to pretend that they still have “culture” in order to
feel superior to the masses. In the latter case, this feeling of
superiority is the upscale product being sold. In the former, it is
entertainment, distraction from the depressing realities of living, not
in a society at all, but in a marketplace with no real human values. (In
the absence of any real cultural values, there is no qualitative
difference between Gerhard Richter and Adam Sandler, for example.
They’re both successful capitalist artists. They’re just selling their
products in different markets.)
The
fact that it has no human values is the evil genius of global
capitalist society. Unlike the despotic societies it replaced, it has no
allegiance to any cultural identities, or traditions, or anything other
than money. It can accommodate any form of government, as long as it
plays ball with global capitalism. Thus, the window dressing of
“normality” is markedly different from country to country, but the
essence of “normality” remains the same. Even in countries with state
religions (like Iran) or state ideologies (like China), the governments
play by the rules of global capitalism like everyone else. If they
don’t, they can expect to receive a visit from global capitalism’s
Regime Change Department (i.e., the US military and its assorted
partners).
Which
is why, despite the “Russiagate” hysteria the media have been barraging
us with, the West is not going to war with Russia. Nor are we going to
war with China. Russia and China are developed countries, whose
economies are entirely dependent on global capitalism, as are Western
economies. The economies of every developed nation on the planet are
inextricably linked. This is the nature of the global hegemony I’ve been
referring to throughout this essay. Not American hegemony, but global
capitalist hegemony. Systemic, supranational hegemony (which I like to
prefer “the Corporatocracy,” as it sounds more poetic and less
post-structural).
…
We
haven’t really got our minds around it yet, because we’re still in the
early stages of it, but we have entered an epoch in which historical
events are primarily being driven, and societies reshaped, not by
sovereign nation states acting in their national interests but by
supranational corporations acting in their corporate interests.
Paramount among these corporate interests is the maintenance and
expansion of global capitalism, and the elimination of any impediments
thereto. Forget about the United States (i.e., the actual nation state)
for a moment, and look at what’s been happening since the early 1990s.
The US military’s “disastrous misadventures” in Iraq, Libya,
Afghanistan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia, among other exotic places
(which have obviously had nothing to do with the welfare or security of
any actual Americans), begin to make a lot more sense. Global
capitalism, since the end of the Cold War (i.e, immediately after the
end of the Cold War), has been conducting a global clean-up operation,
eliminating actual and potential insurgencies, mostly in the Middle
East, but also in its Western markets. Having won the last ideological
war, like any other victorious force, it has been “clear-and-holding”
the conquered territory, which in this case happens to be the whole
planet. Just for fun, get out a map, and look at the history of
invasions, bombings, and other “interventions” conducted by the West and
its assorted client states since 1990. Also, once you’re done with
that, consider how, over the last fifteen years, most Western societies
have been militarized, their citizens placed under constant
surveillance, and an overall atmosphere of “emergency” fostered, and
paranoia about “the threat of extremism” propagated by the corporate
media.
I’m
not suggesting there’s a bunch of capitalists sitting around in a room
somewhere in their shiny black top hats planning all of this. I’m
talking about systemic development, which is a little more complex than
that, and much more difficult to intelligently discuss because we’re
used to perceiving historico-political events in the context of
competing nation states, rather than competing ideological systems … or
non-competing ideological systems, for capitalism has no competition.
What it has, instead, is a variety of insurgencies, the faith-based
Islamic fundamentalist insurgency and the neo-nationalist insurgency
chief among them. There will certainly be others throughout the near
future as global capitalism consolidates control and restructures
societies according to its values. None of these insurgencies will be
successful.
Short
some sort of cataclysm, like an asteroid strike or the zombie
apocalypse, or, you know, violent revolution, global capitalism will
continue to restructure the planet to conform to its ruthless interests.
The world will become increasingly “normal.” The scourge of “extremism”
and “terrorism” will persist, as will the general atmosphere of
“emergency.” There will be no more Trumps, Brexit referendums, revolts
against the banks, and so on. Identity politics will continue to
flourish, providing a forum for leftist activist types (and others with
an unhealthy interest in politics), who otherwise might become a
nuisance, but any and all forms of actual dissent from global capitalist
ideology will be systematically marginalized and pathologized.
This
won’t happen right away, of course. Things are liable to get ugly first
(as if they weren’t ugly enough already), but probably not in the way
we’re expecting, or being trained to expect by the corporate media.
Look, I’ll give you a dollar if it turns out I’m wrong, and the
Russians, terrorists, white supremacists, and other “extremists” do
bring down “democracy” and launch their Islamic, white supremacist,
Russo-Nazi Reich, or whatever, but from where I sit it looks pretty
clear … tomorrow belongs to the Corporatocracy.
C. J. Hopkins is
an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in
Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and
Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
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