July 15, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Viajar24h.com
The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition
between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for
domination of the world's resources. In America, it's taken for granted
that Soviet communism lost (though China's more capitalist variant seems
to be doing well), and the superiority of neo-liberal economics -- as
epitomized by the great multinational corporations -- was thus affirmed
for all time and eternity.
There's a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says:
choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to
become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking
things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which
they've taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of
the Soviet system -- too often leaving their employees, customers, and
other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy
citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back
in the day.
It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our
government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken
control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what
we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures
are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and
small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by
Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far
distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing
executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals,
and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of
our freedom.
With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which
Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims
and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.
Reduced Choice and Big-Box Censorship
We see it most evidently when we go to the store. Back in the 1970s,
the American retail landscape was still mostly dominated by mom-and-pop
stores, which in turn carried merchandise also made by small
manufacturers (many of them right here in the US). Not only did this
complex economy sustain tens of millions of comfortable middle-class
jobs; it also produced a dazzling variety of retail choices. Every store
on Main Street carried somewhat different merchandise, bought from a
different group of preferred suppliers. A shoe store might carry 20
different brands. The shoe store down the street might differentiate
itself by carrying 10 of the same brands, and 10 different ones. The
result was a very wide range of consumer choices -- though you did have
to go from store to store to find it -- and a rich variety of stores
that competed aggressively for their customers' attention. And if you
visited a different part of the country, the selection might be very
different from what you'd get back home.
Now, every Macy's in America carries the same dozen or so lines of
bland, middle-of-the-road women's clothing. You'll find exactly the same
stuff on the racks in Long Island as you do in Long Beach. If you're
looking for something that hasn't been dumbed down to the lowest common
denominator, you probably won't find it at the mall.
Big-box stores have eliminated choice even further: The Supreme Soviet
in Bentonville or Atlanta or Minneapolis has decreed what appears on the
shelves of your local Walmart or Home Depot or Target store, with very
little tailoring to local tastes and preferences. (Even our own tap
water is being sold back to us by Coke and Pepsi.) You have exactly as
many choices as they deign to devote shelf space to. Now that
Wal-Mart is selling 25% of the groceries in America,
if you're looking for a specific brand that someone back in Bentonville
decided Walmart will no longer carry, then you're just plain out of
luck. And since the other grocers in town often close up when a Walmart
opens, there's no place else to turn to find it.
This constriction of choice is most virulent when it comes to media.
Big-box stores have very limited shelf space for each product category
they carry; yet they are far and away the nation's biggest purchasers of
things like toys and video games. For the past 20 years, this fact has
dominated decision-making in both those businesses: manufacturers know
viscerally that if the buyers at Walmart aren't interested in your toy
or game, there's probably no economic point in even making it. So
everything is made with these buyers' sensibilities, prejudices and cost
requirements in mind. This became a de facto form of centralized
control, where a handful of buyers in Bentonville ended up dictating
what the entire country got to play with.
Increasingly, the corporatization of our consumer landscape has meant
that there's less choice and variety in our marketplaces than there used
to be. Centrally planned franchise and chain stores have been stripped
of quirkiness, uniqueness, local color, and anything that might be
challenging to the most easily upset among us. The result is that we're
left with a bland, santized, Disneyfied set of choices in goods,
experiences, entertainment, and ideas that's a far cry from the lively,
authentic Main Street scene those stores killed -- and which has brought
us several steps closer to the scary stereotype of the limited and
poorly stocked state-controlled Soviet shops we were constantly
threatened with during the Cold War. Yeah, it's still better -- but not
as much better as it should be.
The Sovietization of malls and big-box stores has launched a couple of
backlashes. Online shopping is the new refuge of people who are looking
for a broader set of options. Local producers of food, clothing,
grooming supplies, furniture, and other goods are stepping up to scratch
our itch for things that are unique and special. These are both
end-runs around the corporatized retail order that's been systematically
stripping away consumer choice for decades. But they've got a long way
to go before they'll supplant the neighborhood hegemony of Walgreens.
Health Care
The Supreme Health Care Soviet has also done a number on the kind of
health care we get, how we get it, where we get it, and who we can get
it from. Again: there was a time not so long ago when health care was in
the hands of a doctor, who was usually in independent practice (often
in a partnership with a couple of other doctors, but that's it), and who
had wide leeway to dictate patient care without being second-guessed.
The doctor got sound, reliable information on new treatments from
respected peer-reviewed journals, and insurance companies generally paid
for most of what he or she ordered without further ado. This extreme
level of autonomy notoriously led to doctors who overestimated their
capacities; but it also meant that whatever happened in an examination
room was -- to an extraordinary degree -- left in the hands of the
doctor and the patient, and nobody else was entitled to interfere. The
result was that, in the struggle between science and the doctor's profit
motive, science stood at least a fighting chance of prevailing.
Now, the profit Politburo has had its way with almost every aspect of this interaction. Two-thirds of
primary care doctors don't own their own practices anymore -- in no small part because the administrative cost of dealing with
Soviet bureaucrats
insurance company overseers is so overwhelming. Now, they're salaried
employees of some large corporate entity, where they're subject to
constant pressure to shorten visits, rack up billable hours, stick to
narrow protocols of accepted treatment and churn patients through.
Insurance bean-counters second-guess every order, requiring doctors to
put in extra shifts each week writing letters and making phone calls to
fight for their patients' right to care. Every channel they rely on for
information on new drugs and treatments -- from the peer-reviewed
journals to the medical conferences to the drug information inserts --
has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical companies to ensure that doctors
won't ever get important information that might reflect badly on
profitable drugs; and this, in turn, undermines evidence-based medicine
in favor of a kind of corporate-driven Lysenkoism.
Increasingly, states are also inviting themselves into the exam room,
passing laws telling doctors what they can and can't tell you about your
own condition (and, in some cases, demanding that they out-and-out lie
to you, for reasons that are entirely political and seldom supported by
science). And as a patient, your access to this co-opted, compromised
care is entirely dependent on what the Politburo apparatchiks at your
own employer's corporate HQ have decided you deserve to have.
Again: what we've got here isn't anything like a free or independent
system, one in which patients and doctors are at liberty to make
appropriate decisions without layers of centralized interference (much
of it from people who aren't even MDs). And most of this interference
isn't from government; it's from various corporate interests that have
subjugated both doctors and patients to a centralization regime in order
to extract profits from them. During the Cold War, this is what we were
told Soviet medicine was like. Now, we don't have to go to Russia: we
can get the same regimented, over-managed treatment from our own
free-market health system -- and we'll pay more for it than anybody else
in the world.
Education: Testing, Not Teaching
My eighth-grade civics teacher used to terrify our class with grim
stories about the education endured by our unlucky peers in the USSR.
Communist education, she said, was nothing but rote learning -- no
discussion, no critical thinking skills, all aimed at preparing kids for
high-stakes standardized testing that would ultimately determine their
place in the Party hierarchy. They weren't free like we were to explore
our own interests, or choose professions that pleased them. Rather than
being treated like full, autonomous human beings being prepared for a
limitless future of their own design, they were sorted and graded like
potatoes, and tracked to serve the needs of the state. All of the
decisions, we were told, were dictated by the central authorities in
charge of determining what kind of workers the state would need, and
which schools students would be sent to in order to fulfill those goals.
The ironies abound. Even as China has ramped up its efforts to
inculcate creativity and critical thought in its students, the United
States has voluntarily given up on those values -- our competitive edge
over the world for the past 150 years -- in favor of a centralized,
test-driven schooling regimen that only a Soviet bureaucrat could love.
Increasingly, the doors to the best high schools and universities are
closed to everyone but those in the top echelons of society, just as the
best schools in the USSR were set aside for the children of the Party
leadership. But the greatest irony of all is that, far from being done
in the name of the state, this is being done by taking education out of
the hands of the state and giving it over to for-profit corporations.
Again, the more "private industry" gets involved, the more the outcome
looks like something from a 1950s John Birch caricature of the horrors
of Soviet life.
And On It Goes
These are just three easy examples. There are plenty more to be had:
* Our modern homes are designed by marketing researchers working for
Soviet-style large developers that dictate what The People's Houses
should look like.
* Our food supply is dominated by Soviet-style government-mandated (but privately run) monoculture.
* Our voting system is increasingly restricted to people who are
acceptable to the party hierarchy, just as the Soviet system limited
Communist Party membership to a small percentage of the population; and
corporate-owned machines count our votes.
* Our increasingly privatized and militarized law enforcement is
starting to owe a lot to the brutal Soviet policing style, too. We have
gulags now -- and the corporations are running them, too.
* Our response to climate change is being driven by another form of
Lysenkoism -- a science-denial movement driven by corporations that are
threatened by any demand that they change their ways.
* And anybody who's dealt with a bank foreclosure can tell you stories
that would cross Franz Kafka's eyes about the runaround they get every
time they try to contact their lender. Checks and papers vanish, and
must be sent over and over. Payments are never posted. And you can never
talk to the same person twice. (We used to think the DMV was bad
enough, but now we know: it takes a corporation to really screw things
up.) This kind of faceless, brutally inhuman bureaucracy used to be the
stuff of totalitarian nightmares. Now, it's everyday reality for tens of
millions of American homeowners.
This is corporate-sponsored tyranny that comes at a huge expense to the
masses. The great irony of our age is that, over the past 60 years, the
more energy we put into resisting Communism by raising up the cult of
the consumer (and the corporations that serviced it), the more our own
corporate overlords were able to seize our resources and energy, and
divert them into the goal of consolidating their power and inflicting
their own totalitarian, centrally planned hell on us.
The USSR has been a historical dead letter for over 20 years now -- but
there are still plenty of earnest Fox-watching Americans for whom
"communism" remains the most terrifying of all scare words. They're
vigilantly watching the leftward horizon, scanning for signs of
government-inflicted socialism, ready to strip their own democracy of
its very ability to thwart totalitarians if that's what must be done to
stop totalitarianism.
Unfortunately, they're facing the wrong direction. The real threat of
dignity-stripping, liberty-destroying, soul-crushing oppression is
coming not from government, but from the very corporations those same
people believed were the key to our superiority over the Communist
menace. Now that the government can't protect us from rapacious
businesses any more, the centrally planned authoritarian state they've
feared is already coming to pass -- privately, for the profit of the
few, free from pesky accountability or oversight, and without a bit of
resistance from the would-be patriots who have been on guard for decades
to ensure it could never happen here.
Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on
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