Marxism, Ideology and Media "Objectivity"

"Having an ideology is not a sin but a sign of principles."

- Julian Benson

Marxism, like any analysis, assembles the available facts, draws connections, notes contradictions and tries to recognize patterns. But I would argue that as an analytical method, it is more rigorous than most.

One of the greatest myths of establishment media is that it is somehow objective. No one can be objective when unique life experiences inevitably shape and influence our views, yet corporate media figures continue to proclaim their status as "objective journalists" when they are anything but. Media bias is a common complaint from all ends of the political spectrum. The logical fallacy lies in the belief that media can ever be truly objective.

What do you think of as "objective" media? Probably what's in the newspapers, right? The Associated Press. I read AP stories every day. On one hand, it provides the blandest possible account of the relevant facts. On the other, there are scores of hidden biases surrounding each story that the reader rarely dwells upon. Why are they reporting on this story instead of that one? Why do they give more weight to official sources in our country than in the designated "enemy" country? Why are they painting this guy as the good guy and the other as the bad guy?

Our newspapers talk about human rights abuses in China or in Russia or Iran. Our politicians, they say, are so very concerned about human rights. But they never habitually mention the human rights abuses of our own governments as they do in stories about China or Iran. They don't talk about the disastrous effects of our wars of aggression or CIA torture camps.

Even so, the facts eventually get out. It's no big secret, the information is out there. Everybody knows the Iraq War was based on lies. People knew about the firebombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima. The question is why people accept these things. We're told by politicians, by the media, that state crimes were either necessary (in the case of destructive large-scale military actions) or aberrations (such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse). And then we move on. The message is clear: we're still fundamentally good people and our governments represent us.


We might have political disagreements with our fellow citizens. The liberal point of view criticizes the excesses of big business, but never seriously challenges it. The conservatives worship big business, or want to reverse history and go back to a utopia of small businesses (libertarians). But this is the spectrum of acceptable political thought in the United States.

In America you can go pretty much as far right as you want, so long as you're not an actual fascist, neo-Nazi or KKK. Fox News will demonize liberals (which basically translates to "not conservative"), but otherwise you're pretty solidly in the mainstream. Social democrat - discouraged but tolerable. Socialist...hmm, okay, you're getting a little out there. You might even be "destroying America". But full-on Marxist? You're kidding! Are you crazy? Don't you know that communism doesn't work? "Everyone tells me that communism is evil, and after reading The Communist Manifesto once that's enough for me!"

It doesn't matter to such individuals if Karl Marx produced the most detailed analysis of the capitalist mode of production ever written. In terms of how he changed the way we look at ourselves, I can only compare him to Charles Darwin. Darwin revolutionized the way we looked at the natural development of species, including the evolution of humans. Marx revolutionized how we looked at the historical development of humanity and the evolution of societies.

We live in a capitalist economy. Everyone knows that, but Marxists think outside the box (as do anarchists, the Zeitgeist Movement and other anti-capitalists, though I would argue Marxism provides a superior theoretical framework). Mainstream economists are great at explaining what went wrong after the fact, not so great at predicting the future. The more successful ones are those who can keep the boom cycle going. People like Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan. These economists win Nobel Prizes. When capitalism is in a boom period, they're feted as the Masters of the Universe.

But in an economic crisis, suddenly, there's nothing they can do. They're helpless to provide any solutions to the problems of capitalism within the framework of the current system. Unemployment in the United States today is a national emergency. So is the wave of home foreclosures. But this is not a priority of the government, which is all about more war and lower corporate taxes while somehow cutting the deficit and paying back the bankers. It's insane, and the inevitable result of such insane policies is that the debt has to be paid off on the backs of workers through massive cuts and layoffs.

You won't hear that explicit view in the mainstream media. They don't provide any real solutions to the crisis. This is the central contradiction in class society: between the desires of the masses and the desire of a tiny elite. And you never hear about it in ruling class media, at least until the Occupy movement forced the issue.


You will hear it in Marxist tracts. And yet somehow, the Marxists are criticized for not being objective? The so-called "objective" news sources can't paint an objective picture of how the world economy really works?

I make no pretensions to objectivity. As a Marxist, I advocate a specific point of view: for the interests of the working class. And those interests are very concrete: good housing, well-paying jobs, education, pensions, health care, free time and yes, consumer goods. Doesn't everybody want these things?

Yet workers more and more have to fight to fulfill those basic needs, because under the wage system, they are a) always at the mercy of their employers, b) shortchanged in pay which accrues as profit to the capitalist, and c) far more likely to suffer in an economic downturn.

If I link to an article from the International Marxist Tendency, I do not claim it to be "objective". I merely think it correct from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism.

People need to get past the view that ideology is bad, because there is a sharp difference between merely having an ideology and being an ideologue.

The Dam Bursts

The Supreme Court of the United States, in a 5-4 ruling by the "conservative" majority, has removed almost all barriers to unlimited corporate spending in elections on the supposed basis of the First Amendment. Extreme right-wing justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito - aided and abetted by "centrist" Anthony Kennedy - have declared that "free speech" and "corporate bribes" are now interchangeable terms. While Glenn Greenwald has suggested that the ruling means less than many in the blogosphere have feared - since, he assumes, it is hard to see how the American political system could become any more distorted by corporate campaign dollars than it already is - the ruling nevertheless is an ominous sign that the American people are about to lose any real role they might still have had in the way their government functions.

For the world's wealthiest nation, this ruling cements the transition of the American form of government from representative democracy to outright corporatocracy. While the "American way of life", as touted by reactionary forces, has always included a definitively capitalist economic structure, the Supreme Court has gone one step further by declaring that in the electoral process, as far as "free speech" is concerned, money talks and everyone else walks. Never have the class forces that govern American politics been more clearly visible. Now, the greater financial resources of corporations and wealthy individuals may be directly funneled into the political candidates that represent their interests. Of course, as Greenwald points out, that's pretty much the way it is now. All the same, the floodgates are now open. The ongoing decline and fall of American democracy has now vastly accelerated itself, helped along by unelected, politically-motivated judges.

Conservatives constantly rail against "judicial activism", except when it serves their interests. This was the case with Bush v. Gore and now with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The original focus of the case - whether a right-wing group had the right to promote its film Hillary: The Movie in the immediate run-up to the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries - was swept aside by the right-wing judges, who seized the opportunity to re-interpret federal campaign finance laws in the broadest terms possible. The new ruling overturns almost a century of legislative precedent on the issue, stretching back to the days of trust-busting Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, and further cements the dubious status of corporations as "persons" under the law. Of course, corporations are like no other "persons" - they are effectively immortal, possess deeper pockets than most individuals, and while enjoying many of the same rights as citizens, evade almost all of the attendant responsibilities, such as paying taxes. And as many have pointed out, it says a lot that this right-wing court has declared corporations to be persons, while - say - Muslim detainees in the "War on Terror" are not.

Finally, in yet another example of conservative hypocrisy (an increasingly redundant term), it's worth nothing that the same political faction which incessantly proclaims itself the most ultra-patriotic in the country has further empowered stateless multi-national corporations to vastly increase their influence on the American political system. As Greg Palast notes:

The danger of foreign loot loading into U.S. campaigns, not much noted in the media chat about the Citizens case, was the first concern raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked about opening the door to "mega-corporations" owned by foreign governments. Olson offered Ginsburg a fudge, that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign corporations from making donations, though Olson made clear he thought any such restriction a bad idea.

Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles.

[...]

In July, the Chinese government, in preparation for President Obama's visit, held diplomatic discussions in which they skirted issues of human rights and Tibet. Notably, the Chinese, who hold a $2 trillion mortgage on our Treasury, raised concerns about the cost of Obama's health care reform bill. Would our nervous Chinese landlords have an interest in buying the White House for an opponent of government spending such as Gov. Palin? Ya betcha!

The ongoing crises of the American empire are the result of a corporate-dominated political system increasingly incapable of changing course even as it leads to neo-feudalism domestically and ecological catastrophe internationally, in addition to its lucrative policy of perpetual war. The Supreme Court's ruling in the Citizens United case will only further weaken the dysfunctional American system, and underlines the need for a truly democratic, egalitarian movement that places the value of people above those of Big Business. What else is new?

Militarism Old and New

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent days, but I was fighting a bad cold that now appears largely vanquished. I passed some of the time watching World War II documentaries on the Military Channel, which like the History Channel seems to be on the verge of embracing the slogan "All Nazis, All The Time." Last night I caught Bryan Singer's 1998 film Apt Pupil on late-night television - in case you forgot, that's the film with Brad Renfro as a high school student who befriends a Nazi war criminal played by Ian McKellen. Singer appears to be obsessed with the Nazi period; not only did he direct Apt Pupil and the Hitler-assassination thriller Valkyrie, but his first X-Men film opened with the young Magneto utilizing his powers in occupied Poland. Now there are rumours that Singer could take the helm of possible prequel X-Men Origins: Magneto, despite his admission that he might need a break from all the Nazi stuff.

Why the ongoing fascination with the Third Reich? On one hand, the answer is obvious: World War II was the largest armed conflict in human history, and Hitler's Germany was its principal antagonist. In addition, the appalling Nazi atrocities that culminated in the Holocaust provide a visceral example of a demonic ideology responsive only to military might - in other words, an ideal villain for the military-industrial complex. Is it any wonder that since 1945, almost every leader of a country deemed an official enemy by the United States or Russia has been compared to Hitler?

The glorification of World War II by the victors is as much about legitimizing those states' own authority as it was about defeating Hitler's regime. Especially once the full extent of Nazi war crimes became known, it became almost impossible to argue against the decision of the American, Soviet, British or Canadian governments to send their armies to Europe. Although the Nazis' crimes against the Jews were downplayed by Western governments at the time - to avoid portraying the war as a strictly "Jewish problem" - in retrospect the discovery of the concentration camps provided the ultimate vindication of the Allied war effort. Since then, WWII has became indelibly known as the "good war" in Russian and Western thought.

Unfortunately, this idealized view of the conflict belies the less romantic reality that, like most wars, World War II was fundamentally a struggle between opposing world powers with competing geopolitical interests. Such a notion is incompatible with its depiction in the West as a grand contest between "freedom and democracy" and totalitarian fascism. There is little room in this conception for moral complexity and the shades of grey that also characterized the Allied war effort - the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps, the segregation of black and white American soldiers into distinct units, the firebombing of Dresden, and most controversially of all, whether the United States was justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In similar service to jingoistic nationalism, the role of the Soviet Union is often downplayed, as in the preposterous assertion of some conservative U.S. commentators that it was the United States that defeated Nazi Germany. Rather, it was the Soviet Union that truly defeated the Nazi war machine; by the time of the Normany invasions, Hitler's armies had been largely decimated in the meat grinder of the Eastern Front.

All of these skewed depictions of the war have one thing in common - to justify our own war policies, to bolster national pride and provide a legitimacy to our governments that has lasted well into the 21st century. After all, if your opponent is Nazi Germany - indisputably one of the most odious regimes in human history - it's easy to promote your own side as morally superior. This is why the Nazis have remained ideal villains in Hollywood films. But as the past recedes further and further into history, we remain focused on it to our own detriment.

It's 2009. To still dwell on Hitler and the Nazis more than 60 years after their defeat - as is all too common in our political discourse - is ludicrous and dangerous. The world has changed immeasurably since then, and the main foreign policy of Western nations is no longer the military defeat of comparable adversaries, but rather the exploitation and subjugation of impoverished Third World nations. By continuing to paint ourselves as the heroic adversaries to a more despicable, militarily comparable rival, we distort the current state of world politics.

I remember well the onslaught of Nazi and Holocaust-themed films that cropped up in the multiplex during the 2008 holiday season. While the Israeli war machine slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and committed its own Naziesque war crimes, we were treated to films such as Valkyrie, The Reader, and most notably, Defiance - the latter, in its focus on Jewish partisans fighting Nazi aggressors, remarkable for its ironic timing. The distorted claims of the Israeli far right that its war crimes in Gaza were a defensive action found their support, as always, in reversion to a World War II mentality, a time in which Jews were the victims of ethnic cleansing rather than its perpetrators.

Let me finish by pointing you to a spot-on article by a German professor in which he examines the difference between American conceptions of WWII as the "good war" and German views of it as the "bad war". Most notable are his comments on postwar militarism. I encourage you to read the whole article, but here are some crucial passages to whet your appetite and establish the critical points:

In 1955 an Austrian member of Parliament shrewdly observed that the most significant developments in the international arena were "the Americanization of Germany and the Prussication ["Verrpeußung"] of America."

[...]

The most important legacy of the postwar occupation may well have been an ever more prevalent German pacifism in all political camps (not only in the Green Party where it is strongest). Only in the post-Cold War era have Germans begun to participate in "out of area" Western military interventions (Kosovo, Afghanistan). Young Germans abhor war and would rather not serve in the military and since the Vietnam War have become ever more critical of American military adventures abroad. The formerly deeply rooted Prussian military tradition was obliterated by the highly successful Anglo-American postwar occupation regime that produced prosperity and the "Wirtschaftswunder" instead of resentment and rejection.

[...]

Meanwhile the United States has become a militarized society in peacetime and sports a martial pride and attendant hyperpatriotism in its mainstream culture and ethos that is reminiscent of old Prussia. As the leader of the Western world, the U.S. has built the most powerful armed forces and destructive weapons systems the world has ever seen. During the Cold War the Americans spent up to 30 percent of its budget on the military. They established an awesome global base system that allows the U.S. to project its power swiftly and devastatingly when needed. It has fought long wars in Korea and Vietnam and intervened dozens of time around the world when it saw its national interests threatened.

This acceptance of a permanent peace-time military establishment and global power projection after World War II has much to do with the hard-won victories and the subsequent American memory regime of the "good war." Actually, the cultural production in the years after the war maintained an ambivalent and darker view of the war which had dehumanized so many of its young soldiers in the epic battles in the Pacific and in Europe. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 stand for this darker view.

But since the 1980s D-Day commemorations turned uncompromisingly patriotic and the cultural production celebratory of the "greatest generation" that lived through the Depression and rose to victory during World War II. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and the ten-part TV series "Band of Brothers" signify a patriotic memory of World War II that celebrates the "good war." The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has done more than anyone to enshrine this new view in his books and in the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. In the words of historian Chad Barry "the good war thesis became a powerfully seductive and intoxicating view of an idealized past and a golden age."

War is Peace

My first reaction upon discovering that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was stunned disbelief - until I remembered that this is the same award that went to war criminal Henry Kissinger in 1973. The notion that a sitting president of the current United States, the world's most aggressive rogue state, could be awarded a prize for promoting world peace is laughable. It's a slap in the face to the families of slaughtered civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Gaza, and I'm sure it will reassure the Iranians that Obama, who still pushes the notion that "all options are on the table" regarding the American right to bomb their country, is more than just a fresh coat of paint on an old imperialist aggressor.

Obama's win makes a mockery of the Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded it to Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." If pretty words are all that is required to win the world's most prestigious award for promoting peace, then any tin-pot dictator who proclaims himself to have peaceful intentions while engaging in a war of aggression is equally eligible. Paul Craig Roberts masterfully highlighted the difference between what the president says and what he actually does:

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

[...]

The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

[...]

“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink. Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

When justifications for war become almost endless--oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists--war becomes the path to peace.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

Glenn Greenwald takes a slightly more ambivalent view, pointing out that Obama inherited much of these problems and, in any event, presides over a war-making state that accounts for 70% of worldwide arms sales. It's difficult to get past that kind of institutional inertia, and Obama should be commended for his efforts to adopt a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. But true efforts for peace require more than mere words, and thus far that's pretty much all Obama has had to offer.

Nothing of substance has changed in U.S. foreign policy. We have seen a cosmetic change in the country's approach to dealing with Iran, one that has already produced more dividends in one day than eight years of neoconservative threats. But the overall American tone remains one of aggressive bullying, where Obama embraces the Washington consensus of a supposed Iranian "threat" that has little basis in reality. It's an open question at this moment whether the U.S. or Israel will engage in military strikes on Iran; I'm guessing not, since any such action will cause the Middle East to explode and widen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into a horrific regional conflagration, but I could be wrong. Hopefully not.

It's true that Obama has only been in office for nine months and can't be expected to solve all of the myriad problems bequeathed to him by the criminal Bush administration. But the bottom line is that little has changed. Once you get past the rhetorical flourishes in his speeches, where Obama has demonstrated a consistent knack for saying one thing while doing the exact opposite, it's clear that he will prove no impediment whatsoever to Wall Street and the Pentagon devouring what's left of the American economy, nor to the continued waging of perpetual war. Again, credit must go to Greenwald for cutting to the heart of the matter:

That was from a May airstrike in which over 100 Afghan civilians were killed by American jets -- one of many similar incidents this year, including one only a week ago that killed 9 Afghan civilians. How can someone responsible for that, and who has only escalated that war, possibly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the very same year that he did that? Does that picture above look like the work of a Nobel Peace laureate?

Let me be clear: any man who escalates one war, refuses to end another, orders drone attacks on a supposedly allied country, constantly threatens war with yet another nation, and says absolutely nothing while his country's proxy commits war crimes against defenseless civilians in a virtual open-air prison, slaughtering hundreds of children and unleashing white phosphorus on the population, is not a man of peace. He is a warmonger, plain and simple, once you get past the slick gauze of corporate PR. To see such an individual awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to peace-loving peoples everywhere, and merely confirms the enduring wisdom of George Orwell.

A Small Dose of Common Sense

Gosh, this sounds reasonable:

Israel promised Russia it would not launch an attack on Iran, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview aired on Sunday in which he described such an assault as "the worst thing that can be imagined."

Israel has hinted it could forcibly deny Iran the means to make an atomic bomb if it refuses to suspend uranium enrichment and has criticized Russia for agreeing to supply to Tehran S-300 anti-aircraft weapons that could complicate an attack.

In an interview with CNN recorded on Tuesday, Medvedev denied Moscow was backing Iran but said it had the right to supply defensive weapons and said sanctions against Tehran should only be used as a last resort.

An attack would lead to "a humanitarian disaster, a vast number of refugees, Iran's wish to take revenge and not only upon Israel, to be honest, but upon other countries as well," Medvedev said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

"But my Israeli colleagues told me that they were not planning to act in this way and I trust them."

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure I can place as much trust as Medvedev does in the word of the Israeli government, especially since Joe Biden appeared to indicate in July that the U.S. government would do nothing to stop an Israeli first strike against Iran. Of course, we're talking about Joe "Ready to Gaffe" Biden here. But although the Obama administration distanced itself from those remarks - with the President personally saying the U.S. had "absolutely not" given Israel permission to attack - you have to wonder, given the Beltway establishment's unrelenting push for war with Iran and Obama's own penchant for saying one thing while doing another.

Throughout all of this, I can't help but appreciate the role Russia continues to play as a bulwark against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although I'm no great fan of Vladimir Putin and the corrupt, authoritarian-leaning government he heads, I understand his popularity among Russians who might desire a more traditional strongman after the economic chaos of the 1990s, the grotesque failures of free market "reforms" masterminded by Larry Summers, and the international embarrassment embodied in booze-addled political opportunist Boris Yeltsin. Following the Cold War, the boost to American exceptionalism provided by the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of a "unipolar" global order found its most odious expression in the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush administration. Although the neoconservatives have been largely discredited by foreign policy disasters like Iraq, their noxious worldview continues to thoroughly infect mainstream political discourse in the United States, with the result that Beltway conventional wisdom is often predicated on their warmongering interpretations of daily events - which of course then finds its way into that ultimate vehicle for establishment-approved political thought, the Obama administration.

As a result, whenever the American media-industrial complex attempts to push a factually false, but politically convenient meme - such as the idea that the 2008 South Ossetia conflict was unprovoked and entirely attributable to Russian aggression, rather than a response to Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili's ill-advised offensive into the breakaway province - it's nice to have Russian opinion providing a counterbalance. Yes, it's just another great power protecting its own geostrategic interests, but with the percentage of blatant lies clogging up American political discourse getting thicker all the time, Russian interests will often lead that country's spokespersons wading into the realm of fact. It's a refreshing alternative, but it also underlines the extent to which, in the propaganda-soaked post-9/11 media wasteland, the United States plutocracy has largely made a mockery of the idea that its public relations channels (or "news networks", as the euphemism would have it) resemble anything like a free press. As in any other authoritarian state, the American media serves the interests of powerful elites. It's just a question of which state's bullshit you choose to believe.