The Hyena and the Word

I had the privilege this past weekend of watching a Discovery Channel documentary on the pack hunting mentality of sub-Saharan hyenas. At least, that’s what I thought it was.

It turns out it was some such nonsense on the Fox News Channel. Some show about “financial investment.” The opening segment was on a recently reported Rasmussen phone survey conducted that found only 53% of Americans openly preferred capitalism to socialism.

A panel of ardent Friedmanites—chomping on the bit to indirectly scold the American population for their faithlessness in the Market—chose to ambush the former presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA, Brian Moore. Clearly, Mr. Moore was not there to “make a case for socialism.” The format of network news programs all but ensure that nothing meaningful can be said in a thirty-second sound bite. Instead, Mr. Moore was the proverbial lamb tied to the stake, a symbol of the immature apostasy of the American public. He had to be slaughtered, in true predatory fashion.

Let it be said that the phone survey in question is all but irrelevant nonsense. The source article claims that the “question posed by Rasmussen Reports did not define either capitalism or socialism,” therefore leaving it to the respective imaginations of its participants how exactly these terms were to be used. At best, the poll seems to indicate a growing sense of anxiety amongst the American population concerning the capitalist model, which is surely to be expected in a period of dramatic economic decline. How such sentiments will clear the path to Petrograd is beyond me.

Mind you, this is not an indictment of American intelligence. Corporate Media (if I may invoke so ominous a specter) have been notoriously careful to marginalize socialist points of view and to preempt much discussion on the topic by an onslaught of misinformation. The term almost has no value in American discourse, and is in fact appropriated (by some deliberately and by others out of pure ignorance) to mean either some version of Keynesian capitalism or outright Stalinism.

The American public is then left with an exceptionally narrow definition of “pure capitalism,” being largely that which was developed out of Milton Freidman’s work with foreign exchange rates. Friedman and his followers chucked aside the Enlightenment’s understanding of “free markets” (predicated, as Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations, on the immobility of capital and the mobility of labor) and decided that markets actually regulated themselves. The notorious Chicago School told us that because, the fundamentals of the economy are a constant, personal speculation cannot deviate too far from them, and hence the system contains its own regulatory apparatus. Were that it were true…

Althusser, taking his cue from Lenin, once wrote that theory was politics in concentrated form, and it was obvious from the get-go that such ideas would be used as the basis to “unleash the beast” of post-industrial capitalism. It should be expected that centers of private capital will use all their available resources (including much of the media) to dissuade the public from accepting any modicum of temperance in their ideological outlook.

In regards to what is now the colloquial usage of “socialism” as indicating anything to the left of the Austrian School (which is nearly everything), I find such thinking at best to be sloppy and at worst to be of an unusually malicious intent. Keynes was not a socialist, and took exception to Marxist thinking in general, declaring Communism to be a greater threat than atheism. However, Keynes, having both predicted and later witnessed the instability of the Weimar Republic following the 1919 Treaty of Paris, was exceptionally aware of the dangers to capitalism caused by socio-political instability, and it was ultimately his intention to save capitalism from its more destabilizing tendencies. One may recall a 1965 Time magazine article which claimed that “Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government.”

Marx claimed that capitalism led irrevocably to monopoly. That monopoly, it appears, governs even words themselves. As long as Americans continue to glean their vocabulary from the self-interested polemics of private capital, we will be hard pressed to even have a sensible conversation in this country.

The American socialist today is much like a gazelle on the plains. It can no longer assume its body to be its own. A claim has been made to it—by predators in the long grass.