Ideologically conventional observers resist such a notion of ruling- class cultural hegemony. They see social institutions as autonomous and neutral configurations, largely independent of any linkage to business power and the state. They treat culture as something distinctly separate from—and even competitive with—politics. They talk about keeping our social institutions free of the taint of political ideologies.
A closer look reveals that cultural institutions such as the media, publishing houses, professional sports, entertainment enterprises, and most hospitals are not merely influenced by business ideology but are themselves profit-making corporate conglomerates. Furthermore, nonprofit cultural institutions like schools, museums, scientific and research associations, foundations and universities are tied by purchase and persuasion, by charter and power, to capitalist-class interests, ruled much like the profit-making ones—by boards of directors (or trustees or regents), drawn mostly from the corporate business class or from the ranks of loyal acolytes in the employ of that class. These boards have final say over the institution’s system of rewards and punishments, its budget and personnel, its investments and purposes. They exercise power either by occupying the top positions or hiring and firing those who do. Their power to change the institution’s management if it fails to perform as they desire is what gives them control over operations.
The boards of directors exercise authority not by popular demand but by state charter. Incorporated by the state, they can call upon the courts and police to enforce their decisions against the competing claims of staff, clients, or other constituents. These boards are unaccountable to the institution’s rank and file or the general public, whose lives they might affect with their decisions. “When the state acts to protect [corporate] authority, it does so through the property system; that is, it recognizes the corporation as the private property of some determinate group of [persons] and it protects their right to do, within legal limits, what they please with their property.”10 Yet, institutions so ruled are said to be the mainstay of democratic pluralism.
In a word, social institutions are controlled by the more active members of the business class in what amounts to a system of interlocking and often interchanging directorates. We know of more than one business leader who not only presides over a bank or corporation but has served as a cabinet member in Washington, is a regent of a large university, a trustee of a civic art center, and at one time or another a member of the board of a major newspaper, a church, a foundation, or a television network. This pattern became evident by the latter part of the nineteenth century as capitalism came to maturity and capitalists moved to achieve a cultural hegemony that would be useful to their economic dominance. As one historian describes it:
In short order the railroad presidents, copper barons, the big dry-goods merchants and the steel masters became Senators, ruling the highest councils of the national government . . . but they also became in even greater number lay leaders of churches, trustees of universities, partners or owners of newspapers or press services and figures of fashionable, cultured society. And through all these channels they labored to advance their policies and principles.11
With command over organizational structure, personnel, and budget, the owners and trustees pretty much call the tune. They may not be able to exercise perfect control over every note that is played but employees who stray too far from the score, who create too much cacophony, eventually find themselves without pay or position. Along with the punishments there are the rewards for compliance—the grants, fellowships, commissioned studies, honorary awards, special programs, promotions, top appointments, conference invitations, fat lecture fees, junkets, and other such career enticements.
Cultural dominance provides a number of payoffs for the plutocrats:
First, cultural institutions such as the media, and the health and entertainment industries are a major source of capital accumulation. Capitalists are involved in them because they make lots of money from them.
Second, nonprofit institutions such as universities, professional schools and research centers provide the kind of services and trained personnel that business does not want to pay for itself. When capitalists realized they needed literate, punctual and compliant machinists, they then favored public schools. When they needed lawyers, engineers and managers, they approved of professional and technical schools. The substantial public funds used to sustain these institutions represent an indirect public subsidy to the private sector.
Third, these institutions are crucial instruments of ideological and class control, socializing people into values that are functional to the existing system, while suppressing perspectives that are not.
Fourth, not only through propaganda and socialization but also through “good works,” or the appearance of such, do plutocrats achieve hegemonic legitimacy. The ruthless industrialist becomes the generous philanthropist; the expropriator becomes “a leader of society,” a trustee of our social and cultural needs. This was a conscious policy on the part of some moneyed leaders. 12 To appreciative American audiences Mobil Corporation was for years better known as the sponsor of Masterpiece Theater than as the heartless exploiter of oil workers in the Middle East and elsewhere. Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane and Stanford are no longer ruthless tycoons but prestigious universities. And Carnegie is remembered not for the workers he starved and attacked, but for his Hall, his Institute, and his Endowment.
The primary goal of capitalist cultural dominance is not to provide us with nice concerts and museums but to give capitalism’s exploitative reality a benign gloss and providential appearance so that people learn to accept and admire the “stewardship” of the owning class. So some say, “More for the rich means more for the rest of us because they create the jobs we need” and, “they do a lot of other good things for society.”
In fact, some of their undertakings do have beneficial spinoffs. This brings us back to Antonio Gramsci’s insights about how hegemony works to induce the people to consent in their own oppression. Gramsci noted that the capitalist class achieves hegemony not only by propagating the self-serving values, attitudes and beliefs but by actually performing vital social functions that have diffuse benefits. Railroads and highways may enrich the magnates, but they also provide transportation for much of the public. Private hospitals are for-profits not for people, but people who can afford them do get treated. The law is a class instrument, but it must also to some degree be concerned with public safety.
Gramsci notes that if a ruling class fails to keep up the appearance of being concerned for the public interest at least some of the time, its legitimacy will decline, its cultural and national hegemony will falter and its power will shrink back to its police and military capacity, leaving it with a more overtly repressive but ultimately less secure rule.13
The struggle for democratic change is long and difficult, but progressive victories are not impossible. The ruling class rules, but not quite in the way it wants. Its socializing agencies do not work with perfect effect. To maintain popular acceptance and democratic appearances it must lie, distort, and try to hide its oppression and unjust privileges. Occasionally it even must make concessions to popular demands.
In time, the legitimating ideology propagated by the plutocracy becomes a two-edged sword. Hypocrisies that rulers mouth about “democracy” and “fair play” are more than just the tribute vice pays to virtue. Such standards put limitations on ruling-class oppression once the public takes them seriously and fights for them. Legitimacy cuts both ways within cultural institutions. The danger with calling the oligarchic university a “democratic institution” is that students and faculty may take the assertion seriously and demand the right to ideological diversity and self-governance.
In sum, monopoly culture, like monopoly economy, suffers from internal contradictions. It can invent and control just so much of reality. Its socialization is imperfect and not without vulnerabilities. It cannot rest absolutely secure bec
ause it does not serve the people, yet it must pretend that it does. Its legitimating deceptions are soft spots of vulnerability, through which democratic forces can sometimes press for greater gains.
An understanding of monopoly culture shows us how difficult it is to fight capitalism on its own turf, but sometimes it is the only turf available. At the same time, we must continue to create alternatives to monopoly culture—alternative media, films, art, schools, and scholarship. But such a “counterculture” must be grounded in an alternative politics so that it confronts rather than evades the realities of class power and avoids devolving into cultural exotica and inner migration. It is easier to shock the plutocracy with cultural deviance than to defeat it with mass revolutionary organization.
The struggle for democracy is, among other things, a struggle to win back the entire cultural and social life of the people, so that someday we can say this land is our land, and so too this art and science, this learning and healing, this prayer and song, this peace and happiness.
28 THE FLIGHT FROM CLASS
Writers of varying political persuasions, including some who consider themselves to be on the left, maintain that class is a concept that is no longer preeminently relevant to understanding what is happening in society. Class is dismissed out of hand as an outworn Marxist notion. At a conference at Brown University years ago, I heard the anarchist Murray Bookchin assert, “There are no classes, only people.”
Dissident ideas become all the more difficult to express when there are no acceptable words to express them. With the C-word out of the way, it is then easy to dispose of other “irrelevant” concepts such as class privilege, class interest, class power, class exploitation, class conflict, and class struggle.
When acknowledged at all, the concept of class is treated as nothing more than an occupational status, an educational or income level, or a social lifestyle. Thus reduced to a set of demographic traits, one’s class affiliation certainly can seem to have a relatively low political salience, less significant than, say, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other components of “identity politics.” Society itself is perceived as little more than a pluralistic configuration of status groups, having nothing to do with the dynamics of wealth and power. In this way have many observers perfected the art of looking at class in capitalist society without ever having to look at capitalism itself.
But class, as used by those who are awake to broader social dynamics, has another meaning: it describes an interrelationship. Classes get their definition from each other. One cannot think of a class as just existing unto itself. There can be no slaveholders without slaves, no lords without serfs, no capitalists without workers. The crucial axis of the relationship, however, is not between the two classes as such but pertains to the relationship each class has to the means of production, to ownership (or nonownership) of the land, industry, and wealth of society, and to the exploitative nature of the process of production and capital accumulation.
This defining relationship involves a conflict of material interests between those who own and those who work for those who own. Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between master and slave, lord and serf, boss and worker is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of value from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This explains how some people can get ever richer without working or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher perches of wealth and power are keenly aware of their favored position. While they occasionally differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit a workable cohesion when it comes to protecting the overall class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in “owning class,” “upper class,” or “moneyed class.” And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the “ruling class,” or plutocracy. This country’s superrich owning class labors hard to engineer the impression that it does not possess the lion’s share of wealth and investment, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such an unwillingness to discuss class power is not symptomatic of a lack of class consciousness, quite the opposite.
Conservative ideologies justify existing socio-economic inequities as inevitable outcomes of largely innate human proclivities. But if the very rich are just naturally superior to the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many government protections, services, bailouts, subsidies, and other special considerations—at our expense? Their “naturally superior talents” include unprincipled and illegal subterfuges such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider trading, fraud, tax evasion, unfair competition, bribery, rigged laws, ecological spoliation, labor-contract violations, harmful products, and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such morally inferior ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the endemic venality, rapacity, hypocrisy, and crimes.
The idea that wealth is constantly being transferred from the labor of many into the accounts of the few is widely at variance with the established notion that the relationship between rich and poor, owner and worker, is not exploitative but symbiotic. The question “Where would workers be without the company?” is more likely to be asked than “Where would the company be without workers?” Worker and owner are supposedly engaged in a mutually beneficial “teamwork.” Such class collaboration is presumed beneficial to all. Conversely, class strife is seen as harmful to all.
Even among persons normally identified as progressive, one finds a reluctance to deal with the reality of capitalist class-power. Sometimes the dismissal of the C-word is quite categorical. At a meeting in New York in 1986 I heard the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz exclaim, “When I hear the word ‘class’ I just yawn.” Through the whole evening he never used the term “Marxist” without preceding it with the loaded adjective “orthodox,” as if by definition Marxism was a set of rigid dogmatic beliefs, and not a fruitful mode of inquiry.
Aronowitz’s self-appointed task is, in his words, “to interrogate Marxists’ habitual separation of political economy and culture and to make a contribution to their articulation, even reunification.” 14 But his dismissive boredom with the term “class” and his energetic bludgeoning of something he calls “orthodox Marxism” would suggest that he is more interested in replacing class analysis with cultural explanations than in linking class and culture. While claiming that the two concepts are complimentary, he seems to treat them as adversarial.
Aronowitz was one of several people who edited Social Text, a journal devoted to articles that specialize in impenetrable verbiage and niggling academic one-upmanship, supposedly representative of a field called “cultural studies,” whose primary function seems to be to deny the importance and centrality of class power. (That the journal’s writings are seldom connected to the real world was demonstrated in 1996 by physicist Alan Sokal, himself a leftist, who wrote a parody and submitted it to Social Text. Sokal’s piece was laden with bloated but trendy hypertheorized jargon and many footnoted references to the likes of Jacques Derrida and Aronowitz himself. It purported to be an “epistemic exposition” of “recent developments in quantum gravity” and “the space-time manifold” and “foundational conceptual categories of prior science” that have “become problematized and relativized” with “profound implications for the content of a future post-modern and liberatory science.” Various Social Text editors, including Aronowitz, read and accepted the piece as a serious contribution. After they published it, Sokal revealed that it was little more than fabricated gibberish and hot air that “wasn’t obliged t
o respect any standards of evidence or logic.” In effect, he demonstrated that the journal’s editors were themselves so profoundly immersed in pretentiously inflated, obscurantist, and incomprehensible discourse as to be unable to distinguish a genuine intellectual effort from a silly hoax. Aronowitz responded by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated.”15)
Another left academic, Ronald Aronson, claims that classes in capitalist society have become “less polarized” and class exploitation is not an urgent issue nowadays because labor unions “have achieved power to protect their members and affect social policy.” 16 This at a time when many unions were being destroyed, real wages were slumping, the income gap was wider than in decades, and the number of people living in poverty throughout the capitalist world was (and still is) growing at a faster rate than the world’s population.
The left anti-class theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that? Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most of these theorists have yet to discover the subject. While perpetually pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist left, they would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who dominate intellectual discourse in this country—yet another hallucination they share with conservatives.
Contrary Notions Page 23