The slogan "Marxism is dead" was proclaimed almost immediately on the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Very soon after, a strange ideological inversion occurred. In place of "the inevitable victory of the proletariat" which Marx had predicted almost 150 years earlier, there was "inevitable globalisation" instead.
The victory of the working classes of the world, according to scientific socialism, was inevitable because of historically deepening contradictions between capitalist productive forces and relations, contradictions which would by dialectical necessity issue in socialism (or "the first stage of communism" as Marx put it). This defining certitude of the greatest oppositional movement in the history of capitalism did not, as we know, turn out to be in accord with the facts. And so an industry of post-modernism has arisen to attack Marx's meta-narrative of necessity. But a deeper irony of history has emerged.
The totalising certitude of an inevitable world revolution has only shifted sides. What was once abhorred by liberal theory as the metaphysic of "Marxist economic determinism" has become instead the program of "inevitable economic restructuring." What was formerly condemned as a brutal violation of people's freedom to decide how they live is now declared, on the contrary, as a matter in which "there is no alternative." The difference is that this revolution is not forward towards a higher stage of social co-operation, but backwards to the satanic mills and universalising misery of the industrial revolution.
As for the reversal of Marxist and market positions on the question of knowing history in advance and the inevitability of social re-engineering, this astonishing reversal of identities has transpired in the dark regions of the ruling psyche. Yet no rectitude was more deeply anchored before the fall of the Berlin Wall than repudiation of the belief in "economic determinism" or "historical necessity." Moral civilization was triumphant, most believed, when such scientistic predestinations of world power had been defeated by "the free world."
But hardly had this triumphal victory of free will been won than the old enemy of historical inevitability became the ruling mindset of a blitzkrieg of corporate globalization. The "world-wide market revolution" is now declared an overriding destiny for all, determining the future as surely as the laws of nature make tides rise to lift boats. Few in this era are not saturation-conditioned to this doctrinal command. The test is: look at any day's newspapers to see if the assumption of inevitable globalization is once raised or questioned. Then ask yourself how teachers could still use newspapers as sources of information.
The ineluctable fate of all societies on earth, we are told, is "to compete for survival in the global market." This demand has become a regulating principle of consciousness that even education administrators daily intone. So occupied with its demands are the mass media across cultures and continents, so commandeered by its funding regime have the academies and sciences of the world become, that one could believe that indeed this "new revolution of shareholder value" is inevitable. When Winston finally confesses in Orwell's 1948 novel 1984 that "at last he loved Big Brother", he sounded the tocsin of a time to come. One day soon, in under a half century, all would assume as their home of life what they had earlier set their soul against - an order imposed on them by wheels of a higher, inexorable power whose finally defining command is that there is no alternative.
How To Choose A Leader For A Dumb-Down State
When Margaret Thatcher made the slogan "There is no alternative" so famous that the acronym TINA has since passed into the language, the backbone of centuries of British working class struggle resisted. But saturation conditioning eventually overwhelms the mind. If the mass media's advertising spaces are owned by those who unprecedentedly increase their wealth from "necessary economic restructuring", why as "rational economic agents" would they let the public know what is happening?
In such circumstances of silencing and with widening conditions of social insecurity, there is a soft-pedal path for adapting disquieted publics. It depends, as all else in the new corporate order, on two final selectors for political survival and success - the financial markets and the corporate media. The trick is to find a leader to present as the bearer of "a new message" as long as she or he promises "lower taxes" to strip public infrastructures to make room for more corporate profit. If it is a quasi-fascist polity like Harris Ontario or Klein Alberta, the spice of attack-the-poor "populism" and public "big lies" are added to propel the occupation.1
On the other hand, the people might have lived through fascism and be a little wiser, as in Britain. To ensure that its restructured economy continued down the same path after Maggie Thatcher, a movement was selected from long-out-of-office Labour. It was called "the third way", a vague slogan recycled from the Vietnam War. The "third way" was led by Tony Blair who could be counted on, precisely, not to represent a third way, but to hold to the course of "no alternative" as a condition of achieving office. Before "gaining business confidence", Blair had to make his servitude to the new order clear to the primary selectors - the corporate mass media and the nation's London financial centre. This route of succession was predictable from the given circumstances if Blair's leadership was to be counted on to sustain the "inevitable market revolution."
Blair obliged, and turned the Labour Party inside out to satisfy his selectors. The Murdoch press favoured him with the mass media attention required for public-image sale. London's financial district gave tacit consent by not warning of a severe economic downturn and threatening capital flight if he were elected, the standard blocking tactics to any democratic option.
Evidence for the success of these arrangements is not hard to piece together. Consistently unhostile and favourable coverage of Blair - unheard of for a Labour leader - came from the Rupert Murdoch press. No dire forecasts or even hints of economic instability came from London's financial district. The other side of the arrangement proceeded in pattern. Murdoch's giant corporation was not pursued to pay tens of millions of British taxes which it continued to evade by financial location in offshore banks (again unprecedentedly). Questions of the legality of Murdoch's growing media-and-professional sport monopoly were at the same time not further raised by "New Labour." Conrad Black, a lesser press baron, was offered a peerage, which he will doubtless collect when he leaves Canada after sinking in "the Black hole" of trying to create a national newspaper rather than buy one.
Most significantly, the London financial district got what it had been unable to wrest from any past regime - "New Labour's" formal and immediate relinquishment of all control over national interest rates and currency exchange values to the Bank of England. In that way, elected government control of the nation's main financial levers were placed in the hands of bankers, the eminence grise of the corporate revolution.
The public record testifies to all these facts, but only in the fragments of unnoted connections. To observe their pattern at work again, watch the corporate media's lavish attention to the "new leadership" of the dumb-down Stockwell Day in Canada, or the executioner president-in-the-wings, "compassionate" Junior Bush.
1 The Harris administration's similarities to previous totalitarian regimes was discussed in my article, "A Philosopher of History Reflects on Harris Ontario", Canadian Social Studies, Summer 1999. Documentation of the Klein government's technique of "the big lie" may be found in Daniel Cohn, "Parkland's New Study Questions Government For-Profit Health Plan" and Gillian Steward, "Who Really Benefited From the Sale of AEC?", The Post, Winter 2000 and Fall 1999 respectively. (The Post is the publication of the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute).
John McMurtry's most recent books are Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market As An Ethical System. Toronto and Westport Ct: Garamond and Kumarian Press, 1998, and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London and Sterling Va.: Pluto Press, 1999.