The US

Clinton's National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, is encouraging the enlargement of democracy overseas. Should he extend that to the US?

I can't tell you what Anthony Lake has in mind, but the concept of democracy that's been advanced is a very special one, and the more honest people on the right describe it rather accurately. For example, Thomas Carothers, who was involved in what was called the "democracy assistance project" during the Reagan administration, has written a book and several articles about it.

He says the US seeks to create a form of top-down democracy that leaves traditional structures of power -- basically corporations and their allies -- in effective control. Any form of democracy that leaves the traditional structures essentially unchallenged is admissible. Any form that undermines their power is as intolerable as ever.

So there's a dictionary definition of democracy and then a real-world definition.

The real-world definition is more or less the one Carothers describes. The dictionary definition has lots of different dimensions, but, roughly speaking, a society is democratic to the extent that people in it have meaningful opportunities to take part in the formation of public policy. There are a lot of different ways in which that can be true, but insofar as it's true, the society is democratic.

A society can have the formal trappings of democracy and not be democratic at all. The Soviet Union, for example, had elections.

The US obviously has a formal democracy with primaries, elections, referenda, recalls, and so on. But what's the content of this democracy in terms of popular participation?

Over long periods, the involvement of the public in planning or implementation of public policy has been quite marginal. This is a business-run society. The political parties have reflected business interests for a long time.

One version of this view which I think has a lot of power behind it is what political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls "the investment theory of politics." He believes that the state is controlled by coalitions of investors who join together around some common interest. To participate in the political arena, you must have enough resources and private power to become part of such a coalition.

Since the early nineteenth century, Ferguson argues, there's been a struggle for power among such groups of investors. The long periods when nothing very major seemed to be going on are simply times when the major groups of investors have seen more or less eye to eye on what public policy should look like. Moments of conflict come along when groups of investors have differing points of view.

During the New Deal, for example, various groupings of private capital were in conflict over a number of issues. Ferguson identifies a high-tech, capital-intensive, export-oriented sector that tended to be quite pro-New Deal and in favor of the reforms. They wanted an orderly work force and an opening to foreign trade.

A more labor-intensive, domestically oriented sector, grouped essentially around the National Association of Manufacturers, was strongly anti-New Deal. They didn't want any of these reform measures. (Those groups weren't the only ones involved, of course. There was the labor movement, a lot of public ferment and so on.)

You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and you say that if we apply the concepts that are used in political analysis, corporations are fascist. That's a highly charged term. What do you mean?

I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a rather mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of [British economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early postwar systems as modeled on fascism, he simply means a system in which the state integrates labor and capital under the control of the corporate structure.

That's what a fascist system traditionally was. It can vary in the way it works, but the ideal state that it aims at is absolutist -- top-down control with the public essentially following orders.

Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn't apply strictly to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes strictly top-down, from the board of directors to managers to lower managers and ultimately to the people on the shop floor, typists, etc. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up. Ultimate power resides in the hands of investors, owners, banks, etc.

People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. People who aren't owners and investors have nothing much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, but that's it. That's the totality of their control over the corporation.

That's something of an exaggeration, because corporations are subject to some legal requirements and there is some limited degree of public control. There are taxes and so on. But corporations are more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the political arena.

Is there anything large corporate conglomerates do that has beneficial effects?

A lot of what's done by corporations will happen to have, by accident, beneficial effects for the population. The same is true of the government or anything else. But what are they trying to achieve? Not a better life for workers and the firms in which they work, but profits and market share.

That's not a big secret -- it's the kind of thing people should learn in third grade. Businesses try to maximize profit, power, market share and control over the state. Sometimes what they do helps other people, but that's just by chance.

There's a common belief that, since the Kennedy assassination, business and elite power circles control our so-called democracy. Has that changed at all with the Clinton administration?

First of all, Kennedy was very pro-business. He was essentially a business candidate. His assassination had no significant effect on policy that anybody has been able to detect. (There was a change in policy in the early 1970s, under Nixon, but that had to do with changes in the international economy.)

Clinton is exactly what he says he is, a pro-business candidate. The Wall Street Journal had a very enthusiastic, big, front-page article about him right after the NAFTA vote. They pointed out that the Republicans tend to be the party of business as a whole, but that the Democrats tend to favor big business over small business. Clinton, they said, is typical of this. They quoted executives from the Ford Motor Company, the steel industry, etc. who said that this is one of the best administrations they've ever had.

The day after the House vote on NAFTA, the New York Times had a very revealing front-page, pro-Clinton story by their Washington correspondent, R.W. Apple. It went sort of like this: People had been criticizing Clinton because he just didn't have any principles. He backed down on Bosnia, on Somalia, on his economic stimulus program, on Haiti, on the health program. He seemed like a guy with no bottom line at all.

Then he proved that he really was a man of principle and that he really does have backbone -- by fighting for the corporate version of NAFTA. So he does have principles -- he listens to the call of big money. The same was true of Kennedy.

Radio listener: I've often wondered about people who have a lot of power because of their financial resources. Is it possible to reach them with logic?

They're acting very logically and rationally in their own interests. Take the CEO of Aetna Life Insurance, who makes $23 million a year in salary alone. He's one of the guys who is going to be running our health-care program if Clinton's plan passes.

Suppose you could convince him that he ought to lobby against having the insurance industry run the health-care program, because that will be very harmful to the general population (as indeed it will be). Suppose you could convince him that he ought to give up his salary and become a working person.

What would happen then? He'd get thrown out and someone else would be put in as CEO. These are institutional problems.

Why is it important to keep the general population in line?

Any form of concentrated power doesn't want to be subjected to popular democratic control -- or, for that matter, to market discipline. That's why powerful sectors, including corporate wealth, are naturally opposed to functioning democracy, just as they're opposed to functioning markets...for themselves, at least.

It's just natural. They don't want external constraints on their capacity to make decisions and act freely.

And has that been the case?

Always. Of course, the descriptions of the facts are a little more nuanced, because modern "democratic theory" is more articulate and sophisticated than in the past, when the general population was called "the rabble." More recently, Walter Lippmann called them "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders." He felt that "responsible men" should make the decisions and keep the "bewildered herd" in line.

Modern "democratic theory" takes the view that the role of the public -- the "bewildered herd," in Lippmann's words -- is to be spectators, not participants. They're supposed to show up every couple of years to ratify decisions made elsewhere, or to select among representatives of the dominant sectors in what's called an "election." That's helpful, because it has a legitimizing effect.

It's very interesting to see the way this idea is promoted in the slick PR productions of the right-wing foundations. One of the most influential in the ideological arena is the Bradley Foundation. Its director, Michael Joyce, recently published an article on this. I don't know whether he wrote it or one of his PR guys did, but I found it fascinating.

It starts off with rhetoric drawn, probably consciously, from the left. When left liberals or radical activists start reading it, they get a feeling of recognition and sympathy (I suspect it's directed at them and at young people). It begins by talking about how remote the political system is from us, how we're asked just to show up every once in a while and cast our votes and then go home.

This is meaningless, the article says -- this isn't real participation in the world. What we need is a functioning and active civil society in which people come together and do important things, not just this business of pushing a button now and then.

Then the article asks, How do we overcome these inadequacies? Strikingly, you don't overcome them with more active participation in the political arena. You do it by abandoning the political arena and joining the PTA and going to church and getting a job and going to the store and buying something. That's the way to become a real citizen of a democratic society.

Now, there's nothing wrong with joining the PTA. But there are a few gaps here. What happened to the political arena? It disappeared from the discussion after the first few comments about how meaningless it is.

If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They're going to run things. But that we don't talk about.

As the article continues, it talks about how we're being oppressed by the liberal bureaucrats, the social planners who are trying to convince us to do something for the poor. They're the ones who are really running the country. They're that impersonal, remote, unaccountable power that we've got to get off our backs as we fulfill our obligations as citizens at the PTA and the office.

This argument isn't quite presented step-by-step like that in the article -- I've collapsed it. It's very clever propaganda, well designed, well crafted, with plenty of thought behind it. Its goal is to make people as stupid, ignorant, passive and obedient as possible, while at the same time making them feel that they're somehow moving towards higher forms of participation.

In your discussions of democracy, you often refer to a couple of comments of Thomas Jefferson's.

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 -- fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Near the end of his life, he spoke with a mixture of concern and hope about what had been achieved, and urged the population to struggle to maintain the victories of democracy.

He made a distinction between two groups -- aristocrats and democrats. Aristocrats "fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes." This view is held by respectable intellectuals in many different societies today, and is quite similar to the Leninist doctrine that the vanguard party of radical intellectuals should take power and lead the stupid masses to a bright future. Most liberals are aristocrats in Jefferson's sense. [Former Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger is an extreme example of an aristocrat.

Democrats, Jefferson wrote, "identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interest." In other words, democrats believe the people should be in control, whether or not they're going to make the right decisions. Democrats do exist today, but they're becoming increasingly marginal.

Jefferson specifically warned against "banking institutions and monied incorporations" (what we would now call "corporations") and said that if they grow, the aristocrats will have won and the American Revolution will have been lost. Jefferson's worst fears were realized (although not entirely in the ways he predicted).

Later on, [the Russian anarchist Mikhail] Bakunin predicted that the contemporary intellectual classes would separate into two groups (both of which are examples of what Jefferson meant by aristocrats). One group, the "red bureaucracy," would take power into their own hands and create one of the most malevolent and vicious tyrannies in human history.

The other group would conclude that power lies in the private sector, and would serve the state and private power in what we now call state capitalist societies. They'd "beat the people with the people's stick," by which he meant that they'd profess democracy while actually keeping the people in line.

You also cite [the American philosopher and educator] John Dewey. What did he have to say about this?

Dewey was one of the last spokespersons for the Jeffersonian view of democracy. In the early part of this century, he wrote that democracy isn't an end in itself, but a means by which people discover and extend and manifest their fundamental human nature and human rights. Democracy is rooted in freedom, solidarity, a choice of work and the ability to participate in the social order. Democracy produces real people, he said. That's the major product of a democratic society -- real people.

He recognized that democracy in that sense was a very withered plant. Jefferson's "banking institutions and monied incorporations" had of course become vastly more powerful by this time, and Dewey felt that "the shadow cast on society by big business" made reform very difficult, if not impossible. He believed that reform may be of some use, but as long as there's no democratic control of the workplace, reform isn't going to bring democracy and freedom.

Like Jefferson and other classical liberals, Dewey recognized that institutions of private power were absolutist institutions, unaccountable and basically totalitarian in their internal structure. Today, they're far more powerful than anything Dewey dreamed of.

This literature is all accessible. It's hard to think of more leading figures in American history than Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey. They're as American as apple pie. But when you read them today, they sound like crazed Marxist lunatics. That just shows how much our intellectual life has deteriorated.

In many ways, these ideas received their earliest -- and often most powerful -- formulation in people like [the German intellectual] Wilhelm von Humboldt, who inspired [the English philosopher] John Stuart Mill and was one of the founders of the classical liberal tradition in the late eighteenth century. Like [the Scottish moral philosopher] Adam Smith and others, von Humboldt felt that at the root of human nature is the need for free creative work under one's own control. That must be at the basis of any decent society.

Those ideas, which run straight through to Dewey, are deeply anticapitalist in character. Adam Smith didn't call himself an anticapitalist because, back in the eighteenth century, he was basically precapitalist, but he had a good deal of skepticism about capitalist ideology and practice -- even about what he called "joint stock companies" (what we call corporations today, which existed in quite a different form in his day). He worried about the separation of managerial control from direct participation, and he also feared that these joint stock companies might turn into "immortal persons."

This indeed happened in the nineteenth century, after Smith's death [under current law, corporations have even more rights than individuals, and can live forever]. It didn't happen through parliamentary decisions -- nobody voted on it in Congress. In the US, as elsewhere in the world, it happened through judicial decisions. Judges and corporate lawyers simply crafted a new society in which corporations have immense power.

Today, the top two hundred corporations in the world control over a quarter of the world's total assets, and their control is increasing. Fortune magazine's annual listing of the top American corporations found increasing profits, increasing concentration, and reduction of jobs -- tendencies that have been going on for some years.

Von Humboldt's and Smith's ideas feed directly into the socialist-anarchist tradition, into the left-libertarian critique of capitalism. This critique can take the Deweyian form of a sort of workers'-control version of democratic socialism, or the left-Marxist form of people like [the Dutch astronomer and political theorist] Anton Pannekoek and [the Polish-German revolutionary] Rosa Luxemburg, or [the leading anarchist] Rudolf Rocker's anarcho-syndicalism (among others).

All this has been grossly perverted or forgotten in modern intellectual life but, in my view, these ideas grow straight out of classical, eighteenth-century liberalism. I even think they can be traced back to seventeenth-century rationalism.