I interviewed Chris Hedges on Praxis at the end of February and transcribed it so that non-listeners can read our conversation. A shortened version is printed in this week’s Inlander and available online here. Audio will be available in the Praxis archive soon.
Taylor Weech, Host: Today I am very excited to be joined live on the phone by Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges, columnist and writer writing at truthdig.com and coming to Spokane this upcoming March 10th at the Bing Crosby Theater to talk about his newest book, “Wages of Rebellion”. How are you doing Chris?
Chris Hedges: I’m good, thank you.
TW: We have a very interesting audio set up rigged here today but I am glad to be talking to you. I just want to start by sharing a little summary of your new book, “Wages of Rebellion”, talking about how we are again as at many times in history “…riding a crest of a revolutionary epic from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In “Wages of Rebellion,” Chris Hedges, who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in previous books investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion and resistance.” What led you through your past books and writing to this specific topic now at this moment and what do you hope people get out of this newest book?
CH: Well you know I’ve written about the political and social and cultural and economic system we live under in books such as “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”, “Death of the Liberal Class”, which talked about how those bodies or institutions within our society that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible no longer function, as well as my last book which I did with the cartoonist Joe Sacco, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt”, where we went into the poorest pockets of the United States. Camden, New Jersey, which per capita is the poorest city in the U.S.; the coal fields of southern West Virginia; Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the Lakota Sioux reservation where the average life expectancy for a male is 48 and where at any one time 60% of the residents have neither electricity or running water; and the produce fields in North Florida where we see periodically examples where law enforcement will uncover virtually a slave operation where workers in the produce fields are being held against their will and not paid. The idea in the last book was to look at these sacrifice zones, places that have been sacrificed.
So let’s say in the case of the coal fields, apartment buildings or used car lots can leave their lights on all night while we are turning the Appalachian Mountains into a toxic waste dump. Looking at manufacturing centers which are now descended into decay and poverty. And of course this whole project of exploitation began with westward expansion and the decimation of Native Americans. We live in an age where unfettered capitalism, which as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force and it behooves us to look at these zones and what has happened because the world is rapidly becoming a sacrifice zone. So this book builds on those last three and no longer am I attempting to make the argument that this kind of corporate coup d’etat that has taken place and rendered the citizen impotent…
I no longer attempt to lay out the features and examples that describe that thesis but instead look at rebellion. What it costs, how the state responds, what it takes. And I include the reflections of people who have risen up and rebelled against the corporate state in the book including people such as Julian Assange from Wikileaks who has taken refuge now; Mumia Abu Jamal, a great Black Panther leader who’s now being held with a life sentence in a prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania; Jeremy Hammond, hacker; and others. It attempts to describe the nature of rebellion– responses that we can expect, the mechanics of rebellion so that, you know, sets the book apart in a way from the other three that are more an examination of the system.
TW: Sure, and I think that’s perfectly timed in a lot of ways. My introduction to your work was with “Empire of Illusion”. I was graduating from high school and felt a vague distaste for pretty much everything going on and it really helped jump start this analysis of what’s going on? We’re living in a society where there isn’t any critical analysis and I think you’ve really gone through those topics with a lot of detail. I’ve spent most of the last 3 years of this show looking at conditioning, public relations., coercion, manipulation, social control and now we’re at this point where it’s really urgent that we undo those things and explore: how do we undo this conditioning and make room for something new and vibrant and functional?
Which, perhaps you could agree, is what a revolution would be comprised of. In the summary of the book it talks about the question, “What are the social and psychological factors that cause revolution?” What, without spoiling the book, what are those? Is it just the urgency of living in a dire situation in a sacrifice zone like those you mentioned or is there something else that happens on an individual level?
CH: Well, there’s several components to revolt which historians have looked at throughout human history. It’s pretty universally agreed that movements for seismic social change or revolutions are not carried out solely by the poor– that’s something that Marx understood– but by those whose expectations of what a society would offer them economically, politically and socially are being thwarted. Revolutions seem to inevitably arise when there’s a better preceding period of economic expansion and an opening up of civil liberties and then that economic expansion contracts and the state becomes more draconian in terms of its forms of control.
Greece is kind of a perfect example of what is feared by many in the E.U. [Uprisings in Greece] can trigger what these historians call revolutionary waves. So let’s say the Greek government, which may very well withdraw from the Euro, and many members of the Greek new ruling party have a Marxist orientation and are not seeking to accommodate themselves to a system of global capitalism, but to sever themselves from it. What will the effect of this be in Spain where you have 25% unemployment? What will the effect be in Italy, in Portugal, and everywhere else? And that is, interestingly enough, kind of how these revolutionary movements throughout history have this amazing rippling effect.
For instance, you have the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian uprising, the only successful slave revolt in history, all sort of coming one after the other. People forget that that revolutionary foment was very strong in countries such as England under the Pitt government. The British government managed to successfully quell it and part of that was the exiling of Thomas Paine who played a fundamental role through “Common Sense” and his writings in the American Revolution and then when doing the same thing in Britain. He fled to France and became a deputy in the national assembly, one of two foreign deputies, and then of course denounced the Reign of Terror and was imprisoned. But here you have one figure who embodied that kind of migration in his own life and that’s what happens.
So, it’s important to understand that when systems are seized by a tiny oligarchy whether it’s a nobility, or a small group of military figures, or in our case corporate oligarchs what happens is you create a system of political paralysis where the government no longer responds nor is capable of responding to the needs of citizens and that becomes very dangerous. It’s something for instance that I saw in the former Yugoslavia where after Tito died, you have in essence a kind of liberal government in terms of outlook, but because especially after the Cold War when Yugoslavia no longer occupied the position of a buffer state, they were saddled with tremendous debt. They couldn’t service that debt of 9 billion dollars and the economy collapses, the state-run enterprises could no longer be sustained, hyper inflation swept through the country, and that self identified kind of democratic liberal elite that was nominally in charge of the country was unable to respond to what was happening to the citizenry. That collapse vomited up these characters like Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić and Franjo Tuđman and others in much the same way that Weimar collapsed and vomited up the Nazi Party.
So here in the United States, we now have a situation where half the country lives in a category which is officially described as poverty or near poverty, well over six million people have been evicted from their homes because of foreclosures, bank repossessions, and despite all the statistics you read, unemployment and chronic underemployment has made life extremely difficult for the working poor. Our unemployment figures are fiction because, of course, when you stop looking for work after six weeks you are no longer counted as unemployed and if you only have a part time job. The average worker at WalMart works about 28 hours a week, but your wages still put you below the poverty line; you’re counted as employed and it’s a great system for the Walton family, who makes about $11,000 an hour, and they hand out food stamp applications to their workers because they qualify. It’s this bizarre system where the U.S. government is subsidizing the Walton fortune. You have a situation of unsustainable student debt, and this expanding military apparatus that is hollowing the country out from the inside. Resources go toward the maintenance and expansion of empire meanwhile schools, libraries, fire houses are closed, bridges and roads are crumbling, our public transportation pales compared to Europe or Japan or anywhere. It’s a joke. And social services are being cut in the name of austerity.
So this is a very similar, though not as advanced and in terms of its reach, as what’s happening in Greece, but it’s a very similar kind of problem. So you know we are as vulnerable now as anyone else because the mechanisms by which we once made reform possible whether through the courts, the legislative branch, no longer work. They don’t respond to the needs of citizenry and in fact allow global capitalists on Wall Street to loot the U.S. Treasury to the tune of 17 trillion dollars now and it’s a system that’s not sustainable. Usually what happens is that there is some kind of a crisis whether that’s precipitated by the collapse of the economy again and all these Wall Street speculators are back in business so that even very sober business reporters like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times are talking about the inevitability of another collapse, or climate crisis or something else. So we’re set up now for a period of revolutionary foment for backlash.
That backlash could very well be a right wing backlash. There’s a very strong proto-fascist force within this country embodied in the Christian right and the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party and militia groups and everything else. And those populist or radical groups which were actually offended on the eve of World War I, the Wobblies , the CIO, the Communist Party, they’ve all been eviscerated and destroyed largely in the name of anti-Communism so something’s going to happen. Where we’re going to go, how that’s going to play out, whether that’s going to result in a more naked form of authoritarianism? Those are unanswered questions, but it seems pretty clear across the political spectrum, this is why Congress has a 9% approval rating, that the system’s just not working. It’s not working for anyone unless you’re fabulously rich and inside Citibank or Exxon Mobil or one of these other corporations. The bottom line is: there’s no interest and no possibility to vote against the interest of corporations like Goldman Sachs. You can’t do it.
TW: If you’re just joining us you’re listening to Praxis on KYRS Thin Air Community Radio. You can see Chris Hedges’ talk this March 10th, a Tuesday night, at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane. Tickets here.
I what to go back to something you mentioned, this historical pattern of unsavory folks and ideas filling that power vacuum that’s left in these systemic collapses. I tend to agree that the most well organized or supported memes and figures are these proto-fascist far right characters. What about that is working and what about, maybe more progressive, maybe traditionally left, what is lacking there? Is it a type of organization that isn’t working? Is it a communication problem? What’s your assessment of that? I know you write about it in “Death of the Liberal Class”, but what is the right doing that is working better?
CH: The right is doing what all fascist movements do. It’s channeling a very legitimate rage toward the vulnerable. As people feel trapped and frustrated and struggle with despair and economic insecurity and joblessness or wages that make it impossible to sustain an income or sustain a lifestyle that is free from insecurity, you channel that rage towards Muslims, undocumented workers, homosexuals, liberals, feminists, intellectuals. They have a very long list of people they hate. And that’s classic fascism. You also sacralize the symbols of the nation in the name of traditional Christianity. That fusion of the iconography and the language of patriotism and religion, which is what tends to happen in totalitarian movements, and the demonization of the vulnerable funnels that anger ironically toward the weakest members of society and they vent against those members as if those groups within the society are responsible for the decline. What happens is that often the very forces that in fact are responsible for the decline, the Koch brothers and others, are funneling finances and resources into these proto-fascist forces in the same way that German businessmen were funneling resources into the Nazi Party.
Unfortunately the right wing in the U.S. is far more pervasive and far more powerful than the left. That’s not the fault of the left because the left in this country was destroyed. As I write in “Death of the Liberal Class”, the liberal establishment was never designed to be the political left. The liberal establishment in a capitalist democracy is designed as a kind of safety valve so that for instance, when capitalism breaks down in the 1930’s, Roosevelt, a classic liberal, gives us the New Deal and as Roosevelt says correctly his greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. But the assault on all those progressive movements whether it was the Progressive Party or the Wobblies or anyone else and the destruction of those movements by right wing corporate forces essentially destroyed the mechanism by which you could adjust and ameliorate and respond to the grievances of the underclass.
The political system kind of seized up so what you get, and again this goes back to what I mentioned in Yugoslavia, is this kind of faux liberalism embodied in figures like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama who speak in the traditional “feel your pain” language of liberalism and yet assiduously serve corporate power. So, you know, under Clinton you get NAFTA in 1994 which was the greatest betrayal of the American working class since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948 which made it very hard to unionize. You get the destruction of welfare and we must not forget that under the old welfare system, 70% of recipients were children. You get the Omnibus Crime Bill which [unintelligible] your money to build prisons and creates the prison industrial complex. By the time Clinton is finished, the prison population has soared up to 2 million. This is all Clinton. You get the deregulation of the FCC, which is not a small issue, so that the airwaves are essentially turned over to a half dozen huge corporate entities: Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, Clear Channel. And then of course you get the destruction of Glass-Steagall, which set up a firewall between investment and commercial banks.
It means your local bank which took your money and had your pension fund couldn’t become a hedge fund. That’s why Canada doesn’t have a banking crisis because they never ripped down those firewalls, but we did. And Clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding he’d get corporate money so by the 1990’s, the Democratic Party had fundraising parity with the Republicans and by the time Obama ran in 2008, he actually got more money and he has continued that tradition. In fact, Obama’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than the assault under George W. Bush. The constant use of the Espionage Act, which is the equivalent of Britain’s Foreign Secrets Act, was never meant to shut down whistle blowers who were attempting to inform the citizenry about malfeasance and criminal activity and fraud within government. It was designed to prosecute those who gave secrets to foreign governments who were considered hostile to the U.S. So that Act was passed in 1917. Between 1917 and January 2009 when Obama comes to power it’s used three times against whistle blowers, including against Daniel Ellsberg. Obama has used it eight times including against Snowden and others.
At the same time, we’ve seen Obama pass Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act which overturns over 120 years of domestic law and permits for the first time the military to be used as a domestic police force and seize American citizens who “substantially support”, that’s the language of the section, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or something called “the associated forces”–another nebulous undefined term–put them in military facilities including our offshore penal colonies, and strip them of due process until, in the language of this section, “the end of hostilities”. In an age of permanent war, that’s forever. I sued the President, as you may know, in Federal court over this in the 7th District Court of New York and won. The judge wrote quite clearly that it was unconstitutional and the Obama administration appealed in the name of national security in the 2nd Circuit rather than rule on the provision, denied by standing in the court, which was a kind of sleazy way to–by fiat– strip us of more constitutional rights. That has been the tradition of the courts including, of course we can’t forget, in the case of wholesale surveillance, which again is clearly unconstitutional.
The Obama administration, because it serves corporate power and this tiny corporate oligarchic global elite has continued that assault, the expansion of imperial power, the use of drones, targeted assassination of U.S. citizens, wholesale surveillance of the U.S. citizenry, all of this has remained unchecked really going all the way back. We began with Reagan but it was accelerated by Clinton and by that point it makes no difference; the Republicans and the Democratic Party are equally at fault in this process. And you know whether its cynicism or powerlessness, whatever it is, this process isn’t going to stop until we make it stop and certainly Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush aren’t going to do anything to halt what’s happening.
TW: Part of this, part of what I think is disturbing, but also opens a little gap in the armor to be exploited, is this idea: everything you’re describing is so Kafka-esque, this whole period of time, this whole post 9-11 existence of “Well, when’s the end of hostilities? Who is a foreign enemy when the enemy is a concept?”. That’s all been tidily swept into cautiousness and into vague language to the point where, as your lawsuit pointed out, language and law become pretty meaningless functionally.
I pulled this quote out of an interview that you recently did and you talk about how, “…We haven’t yet moved into a period where the vocabulary where we use to describe our reality matches that reality. That’s always a revolutionary period because there’s a disconnect between the way we speak about ourselves and how we actually function. That’s where we are.” So talking about citizenship is kind of meaningless when there isn’t a functioning democracy for you to be represented by.
CH: Right, we venerate values and rights that no longer exist.
TW: So what does that mean for seizing real rights?
CH: We’re within a democratic system that no longer exists. The money has replaced the vote. The consent of the governed is kind of a cruel joke. It doesn’t matter what the citizenry wants, they don’t get it. Bailing out Wall Street was, across the political spectrum, incredibly unpopular. When they did a poll on Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, it had a 97% disapproval rating, but it doesn’t make any difference anymore. It’s what the corporate totalitarian state wants and whatever they want, they get. Because quite frankly their lobbyists are sitting in Washington or in state capitals writing the legislation themselves. You can render a citizenry powerless and hold up that fiction only so long before there’s blowback and there is going to be blowback and they’re preparing for it. That is why they have stepped in to strip us of our most precious constitutional rights. That is why there is wholesale surveillance. That is why they have lifted the legal restraints to use the Army as a domestic police force, that is why they have militarized police forces throughout the country. They know very well what’s coming and they’re getting ready.
TW: What leverage does that leave for people who, as the title of the book suggests, people who are getting to that breaking point, wanting to make it stop, throw down the gauntlet as it were, what leverage is there for people who are interested in that and what role does technology play in that? I think that’s one of the more interesting debates among people who are interested in discussing revolution and exploring it. People either think that social media and technology in general is going to be our ultimate tool that works to solve everything, but it’s also unfortunately the source of this spectacle that you’ve written about and also the conduit to all of the surveillance.
CH: Well, yes, and the Occupy movement is a good example. Within Occupy, people were communicating electronically. It’s a very useful tool for organizing events quickly and disseminating information quickly, but because its monitored completely by the state once the encampments were physically shut down, the state knew who to go after and they have been going after them across the country. Oftentimes dragging them into court on bogus charges and letting them plea out on felony convictions with the understanding that they’ve got 5 years probation and can’t really be activists anymore. And Julian Assange wrote a book a while ago with Jacob Appelbaum and others called “Cypherpunks”. It was actually before the Snowden revelations on NSA surveillane, but because they’re kind of savvy about how the internet works and because they were victims of wholesale electronic surveillance, they described these systems as ultimately dystopian and ones that were being turned to create the most efficient security and surveillance state in human history.
So technology isn’t able to protect our liberties anymore than technology is going to save us from climate change. Technology is a neutral force and it’s used to serve the ends of whoever is in control of it. The people who are in control of it, corporations, the fossil fuel industry, the security and surveillance industry, are employing technology for forms of control. So you know we’re going to have to find systems and mechanisms which, whether through encryption, but even Assange said encryption is a temporary solution because it’s ultimately going to be breached. Basically, we’re not going to bring about any kind of realistic change within the society sitting in front of our computer. In the end you’re still sitting alone in front of a screen which is exactly what the state wants. It’s going to come if it comes by pulling hundreds of thousands of people into the streets on a sustained basis, not with violence because we can’t compete with the state in terms of violence. and it will come by discrediting the system itself.
That’s something I saw in Eastern Europe when I covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania. So let’s go back to East Germany, which at the time was the most sophisticated security state on the planet, though of course now we’ve dwarfed anything the Stasi ever dreamed about, and there you had ultimately hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Alexanderplatz, tens of thousands marching through the streets of Liepzig. At a certain point in the fall of 1989, the dictator Honecker sends down an elite paratrooper division to fire on the protesters in the streets of Liepzig and they refused to do it. Honecker manages to hang on to power– after having had it for 19 years– for another week. The same thing was true during the Velvet Revolution, so you know it’s no secret to those who are tasked with the implementation of control, the footsoldiers of the elite, the police, the bureaucrats, the civil servants; they know the system’s rotten.
The hope is that you can create enough defections within these ruling systems to create paralysis. As soon as these forces will no longer protect that tiny oligarchic elite, they’re finished. And i would argue that most revolutions are fundamentally nonviolent. For instance you had during the Russian Revolution bread riots in Petrograd, they sent soldiers to quell the disturbances and instead of quelling they fraternized with the crowd. So the Tsar before he gets back to Petrograd or St. Petersburg, he has to abdicate. So now, all of these New York City cops for instance, some in their off time work as rent-a-cops for $37 an hour in places like Goldman Sachs, watching these guys walk by in their $8,000 suits and getting into their limos, they’ve seen it from the inside. One of the reasons the state wanted to pass Section 1021 of the NDAA is because they don’t trust the cops to protect them.
TW: That’s part of what’s disturbing. I don’t want to delve too deeply into this, but the culture that we talked about earlier, this really advanced warping of Christian notions into patriotic notions that’s fully integrated into the military, which is preying on young men without a functional concept of masculinity or economic opportunity. You wrote a really good review of “American Sniper” that I enjoyed reading though it depressed me and that I think is something that we should be really aware of: the culture that the military is breeding and also creating into this destructive feedback loop. I’m less likely to rely on the human sentiment left after that process than I am with city police in some ways if that makes sense.
CH: Well the fusion or sacralization of the state which was also true under communism it was its own form of religiosity, this utopian vision that would be created. That’s very much part of the military now and has very deep roots within the military. We see it in all sorts of cases that keep coming up and at that point, you marry that kind of fusion of state and military power with religious power and you couple that with huge segments of your population which are dispossessed and you have the perfect recipe for fascism. What happens when society breaks down is that business and corporate oligarchs will make this kind of unholy and often uneasy alliance with these groups. When people like Dick Cheney for instance, who probably looks at members of the Christian right as though they’re lunatics, and yet for those kind of figures they have to build an alliance to create a kind of mechanism by which they can mobilize masses in support of what’s in essence their own dis-empowerment. And these forces are real and they are potent within all dysfunctional societies, including our own.
TW: I think at the same time that that is a real problem, the dispossessed being vulnerable to this lure of more fascist approaches ,there’s also a lot of hope in how viral a lot of these ideas about class war, fundamentally, out of Occupy Wall St and beyond and even with police violence if we look at ideas like “We are the 99%” or “Black Lives Matter”, I think that a more discerning or just a different chunk of the dispossessed in this country are very swayed by the concept and notion of revolution and a different kind of society.
CH: Well I’d be careful i don’t know that they’re the dispossessed. Occupy was a largely white movement of the sons and daughters of the middle class, college educated. They constitute what Bakunin calls déclassé intellectuals, those whose expectations for their position in society could not be met. So they finish college, they’re heavily in debt, they are working at low wage jobs, they realize the system is not going to offer them the kind of opportunities they once thought it would offer them. Unemployed lawyers, unemployed journalists, unemployed teachers. Bakunin argued, unlike Marx, that these intellectuals were vital to any revolutionary movement. I think Bakunin’s right. Revolutions are not just carried out by the poor. In fact, as Marx pointed out, many of the dispossessed and poor are more easily seduced into or mobilized in these fascist or proto-fascist formations that work on behalf of the elite.
So when you have a group of déclassé intellectuals, which I think Occupy kind of embodied, marrying itself to a dispossessed working class like service workers, low wage workers, then it becomes dangerous because often in that class of college-educated disaffected they come equipped with managerial and ideological tools that make revolution possible. I mean, Lenin, who carried out a kind of coup defat or counter revolution to create state capitalism in the Soviet Union destroyed the Soviets and the anarchists, was extremely prescient in terms of how revolutions worked. Though he had a disdain for intellectuals, he kind of embodied that idea of a déclassé intellectual. i think we have seen the rise of that class that Bakunin would have cited as fundamental towards making revolt possible and it has built alliances through Black Lives Matter, through Occupy…
TW: …student debt
CH: …minimum wage, with a beleaguered working class and that again is a prerequisite for successful revolt.
TW: Yes and I think it gives language to the unspoken knowledge that all of that section of the working class has about the situation–
CH: Right.
TW: –but hasn’t been validated in in the same way.
CH: Yes, and Alexander Berkman writes about this that all revolutions are invisible. He says it’s like a pot with boiling water that you only notice it at it’s eruption. But what’s happening is that the linguistic choices that are made to describe and validate a particular system of power being discredited and you don’t see that process until the very end and I think that when we look at the utter disconnect between how we describe ourselves as a democracy and the reality of what’s happened, as that gap widens and widens, those ideas and that language are rapidly losing their credibility and once they’ve lost it, these systems of power have only one thing left and that’s naked force– which they will use, but at that point they’re exposed for who they are and I think that process. I think you’re right, I think that process is something that’s well underway.
Again, whether you’re coming out of the left, the center, or the right, the assault that Clinton really accelerated against the working class is now being carried out against the middle class and we’ve reconfigured the country into a kind of neo-feudalism, this goes all the way back to Aristotle, you cannot maintain a democracy in an oligarchic state. We may have been a political configuration that Sheldon Wolin, probably our greatest living political philosopher, calls inverted totalitarianism, by that he means that its not classical totalitarianism, it doesn’t find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state. And that in a classic form of totalitarianism you have the rise of a reactionary or revolutionary party that takes power, overthrows the structure, replaces the symbols and language, but in inverted totalitarianism, the corporate forces purport to pay fealty to electoral politics, the iconography and language of American patriotism and yet internally have seized all the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. I think Wolin is right, that’s where we are. His book, “Democracy Incorporated”, I never tire of recommending. It’s probably our most prescient critique of the American political system to date.
TW: The program is Praxis, I’m your host Taylor and I’m talking live with Chris Hedges in advance of his upcoming appearance to talk about his upcoming book, Wages of Rebellion (Tickets here.)
I’m talking with Chris about this very bizarre, interesting and revolutionary moment that we are all living in. I want to back up a little bit to something we were talking about with this idea of consciousness of people who have been dispossessed by the system, neglected by the system, disenchanted by the system. I know that you teach in prisons on the East Coast and I think that’s something you’ve been doing for quite a while…
CH: Yes.
TW: …and do you talk about these topics in that context? Does conversation end up going there with the inmates that you talk to?
CH: Well, that’s kind of all we talk about
TW: I can imagine.
CH: It’s the most politically conscious class in American society because they understand–because they’re victims of the system– exactly how the system works. They know that the judicial system is dysfunctional. 94% of people who are convicted in this country plea out. They understand that everything is stacked against them and that the system is designed for recidivism, 60% actually go back into the system. They have watched every form of rehabilitation and programs taken from them. They and their families are preyed upon by corporations year after year it gets worse. Whether thats phone companies, private ones, who charge them 15 cents a minute and exploit that need to communicate– I mean, phones are often the only way children can speak to their fathers or mothers, or siblings to their brothers, or parents to their sons or daughters.
Commissary prices have again been turned over to private corporations which have jacked up prices by 100% although wages remain the same roughly a dollar a day for 8 hours of work and you have an entire system– exploitive system– built to fleece the vulnerable. You now see people leaving prison in debt. Oftentimes they’ve been in prison for decades and they’re walking out thousands of dollars in debt. Prisons are no longer issuing basic items such as shoes. You have to buy a $45 pair of Nikes and you’re making $28 a month and we haven’t even spoken about the court fees when they’re sentenced, I mean thousands and thousands of dollars. I have a student who was arrested when he was 14 for a crime I’m pretty certain he didn’t commit, thrown in with the adult population, given a $10,000 fine, he’s been in prison now for 22 years and he still owes $6,000 dollars. He’s also not eligible to go before a parole board until he’s 70.
They get it. And that’s kind of, it’s a very easy group to talk to because they’ve seen through it and they fully understand that they are the victims of the destruction of our manufacturing base, they’re superfluous to the capitalist system, their bodies on the streets of inner cities are worth nothing the the state, but they can generate behind bars $40,000, $50,000 a year to prison contractors, prison builders, laundry companies, phone companies. And let’s not forget that many of them are working for for-profit corporations for pennies on the hour and we have major corporations, Target, AT&T, I wrote an article called “The Prison State of America” that lists them, even Victoria’s Secret, are exploiting this form of neo-slavery. You have prison administrators especially in California that are going to corporations that hire sweatshop workers in places like Bangladesh and saying “Come back and use this labor! They can’t organize; they’ll be put in isolation if they protest; they always show up to work on time; you don’t have to play benefits and you can pay them less than”– a sweatshop worker in Bangladesh makes about 22 cents an hour and a prisoner working for for profit corps can make as little as 15 cents an hour.
TW: Wow. That’s bleak.
CH: Well you have to look at prisons. Again, like these sacrifice zones that I wrote about, this is the end result of the corporate state. Part of the reason we’re being stripped of our rights as fast as we are is because this is kind of a perfect society in the eyes of corporate oligarchs.
TW: So in our last couple minutes here, I want to try to end on a vaguely hopeful note, not to be trite, but because i think– as you just said the easiest group of people to talk to because they see it are prisoners–do you have hope or belief or whatever word you want to use, that as these interlocking crises come directly to more of us in the cushioned regions of society that this revolutionary consciousness and action will bloom naturally as that anger and knowledge spreads further through the social strata?
CH: I do but i also think that rising with it will be this kind of proto-fascism which has always marked American history. The most violence in American history is vigilante violence used against the vulnerable whether its the old goon squads and Pinkertons that were used against the labor force, whether its the KKK and the White Knights who terrorized African Americans under Jim Crow, and that’s what happens in a society. You create a kind of extrajudicial vigilante force that is not directly tied to the state but does the bidding of the state and often brutally and the state kind of looks the other way. The Brownshirts kind of served this role under fascism in Germany.
Because the left has been so weakened, the populist and radical movements which really opened up American democracy, all the openings in democracy came from those groups, whether the Liberty Party that fought slavery, the suffragists for women’s rights, the labor movement, the civil rights movement have been so decimated that we who care about an egalitarian open society are facing a tremendous crisis at a moment when we’ve been terribly weakened. I take hope in consciousness. I take hope in the understanding that it’s up to us, that the system isn’t going to save us, that we’re either going to save ourselves or be trapped in this species of corporate totalitarianism. But I don’t want to be naive about what we’re up against.
TW: Absolutely. And our hour is up but I do hope that we can continue this conversation with more Spokane folks on the 10th when you come to town and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.
CH: Yes, thank you and I look forward to being there.
And you can read Chris Hedges’ work not only in his new book, but in his weekly column at truthdig.com. Tickets here.