serendipity | The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in
1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new
condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it.
The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for
centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption
that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial
system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among
major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and
popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability.
Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break
with this policy framework — and brought the first visible signs of the
fission of the nation-capital bond.
The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and
Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology.
Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation
of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize
that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states.
Indeed, Western nations — with their environmental laws,
consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory
"interference" — were a burden on corporate growth. Having been
successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the
neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system
of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international
financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for
national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading
eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun
in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world
system.
The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all
political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce.
Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of
environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments
regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling
them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban
asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So
far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health,
safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.
Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core
has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by
their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden
of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans
are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda
and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s,
genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their
native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program
of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa.
The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up
tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and
genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result.
Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use
trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.
As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the
non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political
arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon
continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an
ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against
neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of
military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be
made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.
In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international
community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton
made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the
Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after
innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their
race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our
power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very
effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the
matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first
place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that
"assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that
the Clinton doctrine handily enables the US president to intervene when
and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic
rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US
president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call
for an intervention.
In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the
inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no
fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure
demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is
never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used
together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to
do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats
are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't
"competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary
adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia in the
1990s) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor
confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier
societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."
Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes
legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when
its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the
West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project
was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's
"The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.
The management of discontented societies
The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized
by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how
society worked, and generally approved of how things were going.
Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring.
Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and
the government could then carry out its plans as it intended,
"responding" to the programmed public will.
The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared
consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that
ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments
of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix.
Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control
would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing
discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws.
Such means of control were identified and have since been largely
implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America
sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there
before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of
social-control techniques.
The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a
strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been
managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners
in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely
implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos — where the adverse consequences
of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated — have literally
become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified
shootings are commonplace.
So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions
of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of
Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that
the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking
to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and
overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization
project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight
raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy
laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise
of prison slave labor (see "KGB-ing America.", Tony Serra, Whole Earth,
Winter, 1998). The Rubicon has been crossed — the techniques of
oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to
the core.
In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to
create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are
despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until
some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials
bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble
cops are fighting a war out there in the streets — and you
can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays
its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that
ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public
has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.
The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when
necessary — as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as
we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during the
anti-WTO demonstrations there, and as is suggested by executive orders
that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare
martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the
last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners
introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will
bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.
Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control — standard
practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level
of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for
capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social
group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its
discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group
struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to
stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most
discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional
cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to
manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has
become the front-line defense — the matrix version of divide and rule.
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