Technology in the present social order is used mostly to advance the interests of the higher circles. New advances in technology are not neutral things; they sometimes impact upon us, our communities, and our environment in hurtful and regressive ways. Consider a recent example of how technology has been used to maximize corporate earnings. Monsanto Company spent $500 million to develop bovine growth hormone (BGH), a “wonder drug” that induces cows to produce abnormally high amounts of milk. The drug is causing serious illnesses and greater health maintenance costs for dairy herds, and increased feeding needs and animal waste runoffs that further damage the environment. The cows suffer from infection and malnutrition and must be given even more than the usual ration of antibiotics, all of which gets into the milk we consume. The long-term effects of BGH are not known, but it is suspected of having carcinogenic effects.
The increased milk production induced by BGH is costing taxpayers $100 million a year in additional federal surplus purchases, mostly benefiting a few giant dairy producers and, of course, Monsanto. So here is technology used for “good” (increased production of a food) having predictably bad results for the cows, the environment, the federal budget, and perhaps millions of consumers.
The same can be said of all of the genetically modified seeds and crops marketed by Monsanto and other such companies: they benefit a few giant producers, drive small farmers into destitution, undermine the natural diversity of products, and will likely cause problems for those who regularly ingest the Frankenfoods that are produced.
Developed within an existing social order that is dominated by big government in the service of big business, modern technology takes a form that perforce favors the well-placed few over the general populace. Today much technical research and development is devoted to creating weapons of destruction and instruments of surveillance and control. When over 75 percent of all research and development is financed in whole or part by the Pentagon, then it is time to stop prattling about technology as a neutral instrumentality and see how it takes form and definition in a context of money and power that gives every advantage to the special interests of the military-industrial complex, the profit-gouging defense industry, and state agencies of control, coercion, and surveillance. Meanwhile, the rest of us, the ordinary taxpayers, pony up the funds to pay for it all, while suffering the consequences.
The same myth of neutral instrumentality is applied to money itself. When I studied economics in school I was taught that money was “a medium of exchange.” Such a nice neutral-sounding definition hides a host of troublesome realities. In fact, money circulates within a particular social context. Like technology, money has a feedback effect of its own, advantaging the already advantaged.
Money creates a way of liquefying and mobilizing wealth, expanding the impact of its power. With mobility comes greater opportunities for accumulation and concentration of riches. Before money, wealth could only be accumulated as realty (land and edifices), livestock, horses, gems, furs, finery, spices, and the like. The advent of precious metals was the first great step to a mobile form of wealth that allowed for greater fluidity and accumulation. As any banker can tell you, money is not just a means of exchange but itself is a source of wealth and accretion, and not just a source but the ultimate end of all corporate production and transactions.
With the growth of wealth and the emergence of a moneyed class there comes a greater concentration and command over technology by that class. In a word, big money finances big technology. No wonder that technology, in turn, is developed with an eye to enriching and making the world safe for those who have the money.
What if, instead of defining money in that benign and neutral way, as “a medium of exchange,” we defined it as “an instrument for the mobility and accumulation of capital and the concentration of economic power”? That would give us a whole new slant on life. Money allows for a level of investment and accretion previously unknown.
Again, hypothetically speaking, money is just an instrument of exchange that “could” be used for good or bad, for medicine or murder. And to be sure, in everyday life we do use it often for good things like food and shelter. But looking at the larger picture, money best serves those who have immense amounts of it and who use it to accumulate power in order to accumulate still more money.
One could go on with other specific cultural artifacts and institutional arrangements: guns, vehicles, the military, education, and even what is called “culture.” Rather than mouthing the truism that these things can be used for good or bad, it is more useful to recognize that such instrumentalities do not exist as abstractions but gather definition only within the context of a social order. Thus the instrumentality not only has all the potential biases and distortions of that order but it contributes distortions and injustices of its own, bringing still more empowerment and efficacy to those who least need it.
It is not very helpful to say that technology or money can be used for good or bad. What we have to determine is why potentially beneficial things like technology and money most often are applied with such ill effect. But that would bring us to a radical analysis of the politico-economic system itself, a subject that is avoided like the plague even by most of those investigators who denounce the symptomatic abuses of that system.
20 FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Some observers hold that people often pursue goals that do not really serve their best interests. But others maintain that when making such an assertion we are presuming to know better than the people themselves what is best for them. To avoid superimposing one’s own ideological expectations on others, one should be a neutral observer, not an elitist social engineer; hence, whatever policy or social condition people define as being in their best interest at any given time should be accepted as such—so the argument goes.
This “neutral” position, however, rests on an unrealistic and deliberately one-dimensional view of the way people arrive at their beliefs. It denies the incontrovertible fact that awareness about issues and events is often subject to control and manipulation. In judging what is in their own interest, individuals are influenced by many factors, including the impact of dominant social forces greater than themselves. In C. Wright Mill’s words: “What people are interested in is not always what is to their interest; the troubles they are aware of are not always the ones that beset them. . . . It is not only that [people] can be unconscious of their situations; they are often falsely conscious of them.”
For example, if the U.S. public manifests no mobilized opposition to the existing social order or some major aspect of it, this is treated as evidence of a freely developed national consensus. What is ruled out a priori is the possibility of a manipulated consensus, a controlled communication universe in which certain opinions are given generous play and others—such as many of the contrary notions found in this book—are systematically ignored, suppressed, or misrepresented.
To deny the possibility of false consciousness is to assume there has been no indoctrination, no socialization to conventional values, and no suppression of information and dissenting opinion. In fact there exists a whole array of powers that help prefigure how we see and define our own interests and options.
If no overt conflict exists between rulers and ruled, this may be because of one or more of the following reasons:
Consensus satisfaction: Citizens are content with things because their real interests are being served by their rulers.
Apathy and lack of perception: People are indifferent to political matters. Preoccupied with other things, they do not see the link between issues of the polity and their own well-being.
Discouragement and fear: People are dissatisfied but acquiesce reluctantly because they do not see the possibility of change or they fear that change will only make things worse or they dread the repression that will be delivered upon them if they try to confront the powers that be.
False consciousness: People accept the status quo out of lack of awareness that viable alternatives ex
ist and out of ignorance as to how their rulers are violating their professed interests or out of ignorance of how they themselves are being harmed by what they think are their interests.
Those who are enamored with the existing order of things would have us believe that of the above possibilities only the first three, relating to consensus, apathy, and fear, are conditions of consciousness that can be empirically studied, because they are supposedly the only ones that exist.
In fact, there exist two kinds of false consciousness. First, there are the instances in which people pursue policy preferences that are actually at odds with their interests—as they themselves define those interests. For instance, there are low-income citizens who want to maximize their disposable income but then favor a regressive sales tax over a progressive income tax because of a misunderstanding—repeatedly propagated in TV ads financed by the opponents of the progressive income tax—of the relative effects of each tax on their pocketbooks. The sales tax actually falls proportionately more heavily upon them than does the progressive income tax, and costs them far more in dollars. A limited level of information or a certain amount of misinformation leads people to pursue policy choices that go directly against their “self-defined” interests.
In the second instance of false consciousness, the way people define their interests in the first place may itself work against their well-being. Thus, they may think that supporting the actions of U.S. troops in Vietnam or Panama or Iraq or wherever may be furthering their interest in maintaining the United States as the world’s leading superpower and keeping them safe from terrorists. But the superpower nation-state, with its huge arms expenditures, heavy taxes, gigantic national debt, neglected domestic services, and environmental devastation—along with the death and destruction it delivers upon other peoples and the culture of violence and statist autocracy it propagates at home—may actually be creating more enemies rather than less, while lowering rather than enhancing the security and quality of people’s lives and the nation’s vitality.
To give a less complicated example, there are people who think the system of private health care, ever so costly it may be, is best for them. They have been told, and they believe, that a socialized health program or a national insurance program would produce medical care that is inferior, “bureaucratic,” and more costly. Here again such opinions are well fertilized by the powers that be, in this case the private health care industry. But the truth is that in nations with public health care, the costs are less, the coverage is comprehensive, and the care is far less nightmarish than what is encountered by so many in our present system.
In short, it is possible to demonstrate that (a) many people support positions or political forces that violate their own professed interests, and (b) many people profess interests that violate their actual well-being. Their stated preferences may themselves be a product of a socio-political system that works against their interests. To know what their interests are, they need access to accurate information about the policy world and how it affects them.
The rejection of false consciousness as being an ideological and elitist superimposition leads mainstream social scientists and other opinion makers to the conclusion that no distinction should be made between perceptions of interest on the one hand, and what might be called real or objective interest on the other. Any preference expressed by any individual must be accepted as his or her real interest. (Does this apply to teenagers as well?) This position makes no distinction between our perceived interests (which might be ill-informed and self-defeating) and our real interests (which might be difficult to perceive because of a lack of accurate, honest, and readily accessible information). To reject the concept of false consciousness as elitist is to ignore the fact that one’s awareness of one’s own interests and one’s political consciousness in general may be stunted or distorted by misinformation, disinformation, years of manipulated socialization, and a narrow but highly visible mainstream political agenda that rules out feasible alternatives. It is really not too much to say that people can be misled.
The reduction of interest to a subjective state of mind leads us not to a more rigorous empiricism but to a tautology: “people act as they are motivated to act” becomes “people always act in their own interest.” Whatever individuals are motivated to do or select or pursue or believe, or not do and not believe, is taken as being in their interest because, by definition, their interest is their motivational condition.
The point, then, is that without making judgments about people’s beliefs we can still inquire as to how they came to their preferences rather than treat these preferences as an irreducible and unchallengeable given. For instance, Americans are not congenitally endowed with loyalty to a particular social order that propagates competitiveness, consumerism, militarism, economic inequality, and environmental devastation. The definition they give to their interests—by selecting officeholders who are dedicated to such a social order—is shaped almost entirely by the social forces determining their universe of discourse, all sorts of forces acting well beyond their awareness, especially when the so-called impartial information being circulated is actually profoundly biased and manipulative in favor of moneyed interests.
One can see instances of false consciousness all about us. There are people with legitimate grievances as employees, taxpayers, and consumers who direct their wrath against welfare mothers but not against corporate plunderers of the public purse, against the inner-city poor but not the outer-city superrich, against human services that are needed by the community rather than regressive tax systems that favor the affluent. In their confusion they are ably assisted by conservative commentators and hate-talk hosts who provide ready-made explanations for their real problems, who attack victims instead of victimizers, denouncing “liberal elites,” feminists, gays, minorities, and the poor. Thus the legitimate grievances of millions are deliberately and with much strenuous effort directed against irrelevant foes.
Does false consciousness exist? It certainly does and in mass-marketed quantities. It is the mainstay of the conservative reactionism of the last three decades. Without it, those at the top, who profess a devotion to our interests while serving only their own, would be in serious trouble indeed.
21 LEFT, RIGHT, AND THE “EXTREME MODERATES”
The terms “right” and “left” are seldom specifically defined by policymakers or media commentators—and with good reason. To explicate the politico-economic content of leftist governments and movements is to reveal their egalitarian and humane goals, making it much harder to demonize them. The “left,” as I would define it, encompasses those individuals, organizations, and governments that advocate equitable redistributive policies benefiting the many and infringing upon the privileged interests of the wealthy few.
The right-wingers are also involved in redistributive politics, but the distribution goes the other way, in an upward direction. In almost every country, including our own, rightist groups, parties or governments pursue policies that primarily benefit those who receive the bulk of their income from investments and property, at the expense of those who live off wages, salaries, fees, and pensions. That is what defines and distinguishes the right from the left.
What is called the political right consists of conservatives, many of whom are dedicated to free-market capitalism, the unregulated laissez-faire variety that places private investment ahead of all other social considerations. Conservative ideology maintains that rich and poor get pretty much what they deserve; people are poor not because of inadequate wages and lack of economic opportunity but because they are lazy, profligate, or incapable. The conservative keystone to individual rights is the enjoyment of property (moneyed) rights, especially the right to make a profit off other people’s labor and enjoy the privileged conditions of a favored class.
Conservatives blame our troubles on what billionaire Steve Forbes called the “arrogance, insularity, [and] the government-knows-best mentality” in Washington, D.C. Everything work
s better in the private sector than in the public sector, they maintain. Most conservative ideologues today might better be classified as reactionaries, having an agenda not designed merely to protect their present privileges but to expand them, rolling back all the progressive gains made over the last century. They want to do away with most government regulation and taxation of business, along with environmental and consumer protections, minimum-wage laws, unemployment compensation, job-safety regulations, and injury-compensation laws. They assure us that private charity can take care of needy and hungry people, and that there is no need for government handouts. On that last point, it should be noted, the superrich donate a far smaller proportion of their income to private charities than people of more modest means.1
Conservatives seem to think that everything would be fine if government were reduced to a bare minimum. Government is not the solution, it is the problem, they say. In actual practice, however, they are for or against government handouts depending on whose hand is out. They want to cut human services to low- and middle-income groups, but they vigorously support gargantuan government subsidies and bailouts for large corporate enterprises. They admonish American workers to work harder for less and have not a concern about the increase in economic hardship for working people.
Conservatives and reactionaries also support strong government measures to restrict dissent and regulate our private lives and personal morals, as with anti-abortion laws and bans on gay marriage. Most of them are big supporters of mammoth military budgets and the U.S. global empire, which they seem to equate with “Americanism.” Yet many of them managed to avoid military service, preferring to let others do the fighting and dying. Such was the case with President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Congressman Tom Delay, commentator Rush Limbaugh, and scores of other prominent right-wing leaders and pundits.2
Contrary Notions Page 17