FIVE POLITICAL WORDS AND PHRASES STOLEN BY THE MEDIA AND WHY WE MUST STEAL THEM BACK

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By John Reed

Embraced by Words

　

I hold a Bachelor's Degree in political science, with a minor in political philosophy, advanced course work toward a Masters in political economy, Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and a Doctorate of Jurisprudence with Honors, which is an unusual way of stating I ultimately had no choice but to go to and graduate from law school. I am an only child, the son of an old-fashioned printer, who was disabled by polio as a child and developed a passion for reading as he lay confined to bed for most of his childhood until his father could save enough money to afford the surgery necessary for him to walk again.. He passed that love onto me, bringing home six or seven books every two weeks from the local library ranging from poetry to pulp fiction to the classics, at first reading them to me, and later for me to read and discuss with him. He possessed a love of knowledge that transcended normal bounds. When he bought an encyclopedia, I was around the age ten. Soon after we received the leather bound volumes of cream, blue and gold, volumes of such beauty and scent they hinted to me of some incorruptible truth within, he said to me one night, "Go get A," which I found out meant the volume of subjects starting with the letter "A." Thus began the epic reading together, father and son, of the entire edition of the most current encyclopedia then on the market, volumes A through Z, though some letters combined into a single volume, such as X, Y, and Z.

　

The cumulative effect of this education is to pay close attention to the meaning of words, the words a person uses, the arguments made on behalf of a proposition, and, most importantly, the missing evidence, or the unspoken presumptions underlying another person's position on an issue. This is not always a good thing. A trial attorney's spouse tends to dislike his or her standard for exactitude in language--they tend to dislike it a lot. Familial harmony is hard to attain when intimate and carefree language is taken literally. My kids complain of "bursts of logic," when I counsel them. Sometimes the political philosopher comes out to join the barrister, and I end up talking to the television, alone in the room, when I watch what passes for news and experts. A few innocent questions to a child that draw a suspicious answer inadvertently turn into a cross-examination. My family isn't sure if I suffer dementia or genius, so, although they pass me off to their friends as eccentric and bright, at home they err on the side of just a wee bit loopy.

　

But that training is something akin to a tuning fork when listening to others speak and reading what others write on contemporary issues, causing the faulty logic, the ill-conceived word choice, and the unspoken presumption, to stand out like a sour note in a medley. We hear and read much about raising the level of political discourse in our country. As a result, I started making a list of certain words and phrases I noticed were misused repeatedly in political discourse, and certain arguments made that are easily rebutted but never rebuked, arguments that should be rebuked with all the force the exorcist summons expelling his demon. These illegitimate children of our dark age of politics and political philosophy undermine our history and our ability to think logically about current issues. What follows is the first five of those inbreeds, in no particular order, and definitely not according to importance, what I consider the proper use of the terms, and my reflections upon why the language the American Left once took for granted seems gone into hiding.

　

1. Radical--We frequently hear the term "radical right" or "far left radical" depending upon whether we watch MSNBC or FOX News. On FOX, positions which were merely liberal in the 1970's, are now termed "far left radical." FOX has described Media Matters, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and MoveOn.org all as far left radical organizations. However, if that is so, what is a communist organization: super, ultra, radical far left, to the tenth power? Neither usage is proper political speech, nor proper within the context of political science or political philosophy. Although some modern dictionaries may give one the idea that "radical" could be used in the context of the right wing, those dictionaries merely reflect a recent change in the common usage of the term. "Radical," at least within the realm of political science and philosophy, means getting to the root of the problem: a very simple definition in terms of its political use. A person's political position is radical, therefore, only if that position proposes a solution to political and social problems by solving some root problem in society. For instance, radical feminism, as opposed to simple feminism, proposes that the elimination of patriarchy will end war, class division, wealth inequality, racism, economic crisis, environmental degradation, and the other social ills we face. Communism proposes that the end of class distinctions through the abolition of the private ownership of "the means of production" will accomplish those same ends, along with the ultimate withering away of the state. "Radical" cannot be applied to conservative thinking because conservatives seek to maintain the status quo or to return to an imaginary "Golden Era" in the past. They do not seek fundamental change, but react to ongoing change and seek to restore the old order. Thus, there is no "radical right," nor could there ever be one, unless today's conservative mind posits a return to the Garden of Eden through modern political and economic policy, which, contrary to their public personae, none of them really believe, I hope.

　

On the other hand, a position on the left could properly be described as "radical" if that position entailed endorsing fundamental social and/or economic change to resolve recurrent and substantial social problems. There are not, however, degrees of radicalism, such as "far left radicals," as Fox commentators try to brand various groups. A political philosophy is either radical or not, seeking fundamental change or not, and Fox engages in its silliness in an intentional effort to move the center ever more to the right. Unfortunately, Fox's effort succeeded, and continues to succeed, beyond anyone's wildest nightmares. The American Left today, when we face species ending catastrophes, could barely pass for liberals in the America of the 1920's and 1930's, and the 1960's through the 1980's. The Left needs radicals again, people willing to step out to the end of the seesaw and rebalance the center, large numbers of people willing to question the basic premises upon which rest the whole logic of the social and economic order within which we live: people willing to examine the roots of our problems.

　

2. Reactionary--This is the proper term for extreme conservatives, who seek to return to a time before progressive reforms were enacted to provide protection against the excesses of unbounded capitalism. Thus, radicals seek to try new, socially transformative solutions to problems and reactionaries seek to return to former eras. To that extent, it is proper to say there exists a radical left and a reactionary right, but not a radical left and a radical right. If the Left used the proper terminology for reactionaries, conservatives, liberals, progressives, and radicals, the entire move of the country toward reactionary politics from the center would be obvious.

　

It is good and proper to ask why this distinction between reactionary and radical positions seems to have disappeared from our language in a few short decades in favor of the use of the word "radical" to describe both wings of the political spectrum. The answer to this question is exceedingly important because it demonstrates the subtle ways the public is controlled through control of the terms of debate. Two lines of primary philosophical thought existed in the twentieth century in America. One insisted that history had essentially ended, and all advances were only to come within the world of the hard sciences. Although Man had advanced from primitive hunter gatherer, to primitive agriculture, to slave society, to feudal society, to mercantilism, to capitalism, and then to the current blend of democratic capitalism with governmental regulation and a social safety net, the latter was the highest stage of political, social, economic and legal organization Man would ever reach. The other saw Man's social development as continually evolving toward ever increasing social, economic, and political equality to the point that a state became an unnecessary force in society. If one sees society at its zenith now, then only one word need describe any departure from the status quo. However, if one believes that a higher state of social organization could and will exist, then society needs both the term "reactionary" and the term "radical" to continue in use to describe whether a political position moves society toward the higher state or seeks to reverse the process.

　

By eliminating the use of "reactionary," our media, our controllers, tell us that we have reached the highest state, and that there is no more social evolution to come. Progress, except in the hard sciences, is at an end. Therefore, for progressives, of upmost importance is our use of the word "reactionary" to describe much of the modern Right, so that no one can doubt that we view the Right as regressive, backward looking, and a harbinger of old battles once fought and won refought again and again. And we view history as a progression, with capitalism but one stage or mode of production in an evolving human community that will one day eliminate most all of the social ills of the world. For progressives, social relationships are not static, but are always moving either forward or backward, either reacting or progressing.

　

3. The False Left/Right Paradigm--Sometimes also called the False Left/Right Dichotomy, this doctrine holds that the standard political science horizontal line placing Democrats to the left of center and Republicans to the right, with progressives farther left and the Tea Party farther right, ending with communism at the far end of the left and fascism at the far end of the right, is a false view of these political positions. Pushed heavily by Alex Jones, this doctrine claims that all government is bad, so that the proper paradigm is a circle with communism and fascism joined together at the top, and libertarianism at the opposite end of the circle at the bottom. Alternatively, I suppose, one could use a line, with communism and fascism at one end and libertarianism and anarchy at the other.

　

This new doctrine is the stuff of double-speak, designed to buttress the arguments of the "Shock Doctrine" or Chicago School of Economics crowd. First, note the discussions of the definitions of "radical" and "reactionary" above, which go a long way toward explaining why the original political science line should prevail over the new doctrine. Libertarians hold many beliefs to be applauded, such as that a person should hold sovereignty over his or her own body, and that the law should generally confine itself to crimes that are malum in se and not malum prohibitum. Nonetheless, libertarian economic thinking seeks merely to return the modern economy to the time of complete laissez-faire capitalism, a time which humanity already experienced and rejected through brutal struggle and boundless bloodshed. Libertarianism, therefore, at least economically, represents extreme reactionary thinking, and belongs close to the far right of the traditional straight line used in most political science and philosophy tomes.

　

When one understands completely the underlying political philosophies of liberalism, conservatism, social democracy, libertarianism, socialism, capitalism, anarchy, communism and fascism, and when one does not equate the Soviet Union with communism, which is another propaganda ploy employed successfully in the United States, the traditional political science paradigm makes perfect sense. As one moves toward the left on the line, one encounters increasing democracy in both the political and economic spheres of life, ultimately ending in communism, where, due to the absence of scarcity and social classes, the state itself has withered away, giving way to self-rule through a generations long process of technological progress and human adaptation to cooperative, rather than competitive, living. As one moves toward the right on the line, one encounters increasing state power and the dilution of democracy, ending in fascism--the merger of the corporation and the state, where power is maintained through totalitarianism, nationalism, racism, sexism, fear and war.

　

One final word should be mentioned about the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. was never communist. Communism cannot exist without the prerequisite technology to eliminate scarcity through either local communal production or mass production and effective planning and distribution. Moreover, a tradition of democracy and transparency must exist to prevent the formation of a class of bureaucrats in charge of planning, or in charge of defending the revolution from outside threats. The Soviet revolution of 1917 faced invincible odds. Not only was Russia involved in WWI at the time, but she also remained, essentially, a feudal economy in a world of rapidly advancing industrialized countries. Her divisions often fought on horseback against the tanks and machine guns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire. At the time of the revolution, Lenin withdrew Russian forces from the war, but as soon as the Western allies overran the Central Powers and could reach Russia, they continued into their former ally, Russia, to aid the counter-revolutionaries known as the White Army. This civil war lasted until the Soviet army prevailed in 1923. The western powers feared Russia would default on its massive loans from their banks, incurred to fight WWI by Czar Nicholas II, and feared even more that socialist ideas might spread to the western working classes. They had solid economic and political reasons to fear the fledgling Soviet movement. Yet, their entry into the Russian civil war and their defeat only marked the start of a permanent war against the Soviets. Winston Churchill famously stated that socialism must be strangled in the cradle, the same man who ruled over Nazi style tactics in Britain's suppression of indigenous nationalist movements after WWII, including a camp style system of systematic torture and murder in Kenya based upon the Nazi model developed for the Socialists, Jews, and inferior races. See Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt 2005) 2006 Winner of Pulitzer Prize.

　

The Soviet Union was an experiment in whether an agrarian nation could be guided through its capitalist industrial phase by a tightly organized socialist party into a socialist society and finally into communism, something Karl Marx merely speculated might be possible. Moreover, the Soviets remained under attack by the combined powers of the industrialized West the entire time of the USSR's existence, and we tend to hold them to a different standard than we hold ourselves. American industry was built during most of its history on the backs of its actual slaves, or its wage slaves, with unions not fully developing until the mid-twentieth century. Even then, its success depended largely upon the military control of numerous colonies and protectorates, much to their detriment. Yet, Lenin and Stalin had but a mere decade or so to change an agrarian nation into an advanced industrialized nation capable of defending itself against the combined forces of the Western world. Notably, Britain and the United States did not open the Western Front on D-Day, June 6, 1944, until well after the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and began to push them quickly back toward Germany and Western Europe. In fact, it is probably not unfair to state that the Normandy invasion was as much about stopping the Soviet advance as it was about defeating Hitler. Little else can explain the Western allies' delay in opening their front despite Stalin's constant pleas. Soviet losses in WWII were around 20,000,000 dead, incomparable to Western European losses. Moreover, more and more historians attribute the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to the necessity to defeat Japan, which could have been done with a blockade, but to the necessity of showing Stalin that the United States was perfectly willing to use the atomic bomb upon purely civilian targets. If true, and it seems very likely to be true, first blood in the Cold War was drawn by the United States and amounted to about a quarter million Japanese civilian souls.

　

So, just as it can be said that capitalism differs in the many countries it exists, we should not equate socialism with the form it took in the Soviet Union, where conditions and times were unique. What we can state is that in a society already authoritarian by nature, and underdeveloped, a tightly structured socialist party, willing to do anything to survive against a fascist attack, can accomplish in 15 years what it took centuries for capitalism to accomplish, not that I would want to live through it or in it. Context is everything.

　

4. Socialism--We often hear that Obama's health care plan is socialistic, or that social security and Medicare are examples of socialism, as is the U.S. Postal Service, etc.. Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's "The Last Word," has been promoting the idea of late that anything the government does to interfere in the economy is properly termed socialism. However, none of this is true. Socialism means ownership of the means of production and distribution by the former wage earning class. It does not mean governmental programs which benefit the working class while the owning class still owns the means of production and controls the government. It does not mean redistributing wealth. We could redistribute the cash wealth in this country equally and in no time at all the same people would have it back. Socialism is about economic democracy: the next logical step from the winning of political democracy from monarchies to the winning of economic democracy from the economic rule of monopolies, oligarchies, capitalists, and aristocracies. One need not favor this step to properly use the term. Such measures as Social Security and Medicare are merely liberal reforms within the capitalist system, actually, slightly fascist in nature, as they are used as long as possible to preserve the corporate state and forestall domestic unrest. Although Newsweek recently ran a cover with the bold headline, "We Are All Socialists Now," and although that poor shadow of Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell, seems to push this idea daily, neither the magazine nor the newsman apparently know the first thing about socialism. Socialism is not determined by whether the government runs a program. It is determined by whom owns the means of production, and therefore, by whom owns the surplus capital generated by the means of production. If the wage earning class owns the means of production, then that is an example of socialism. If the wage earning class owns a bank, that is socialism. Neither private ownership with lavish worker benefits nor government ownership, when business and corporate interests control the government, is socialism, no matter how you cut the cake. Moreover, the closer the two become, government and business, the more entertwined, government and corporations, the closer the society is to fascism.

　

5. Feudalism--This is another of those words recently popularized to undergird the Chicago School or Shock Doctrine School of Economics. Probably adopted from Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a favorite of the libertarians, we frequently hear that current economic policies are creating for the working and middle classes a return to feudalism, or, in the case of supposedly more enlightened authors, a descent into neo-feudalism. Such talk is rubbish, and it makes me want to scream at my computer screen or television, depending upon whether it is the enlightened Chris Hedges I am reading or the ignorant Michele Bachman to whom I am listening. Feudalism was an extremely complex economic, social, religious, and political system that took centuries to evolve out of slave society. Its hallmark was titular ownership of all land by a monarch, who, in turn, granted land to nobility in perpetuity in return for military and spiritual loyalty. Those nobles could then again make grants of their land to others, creating layers of various nobility, with reciprocating rights and responsibilities of loyalty and mutual defense. At the bottom of the entire aristocracy was the serf, who was tied by law to work a specific piece of land, turning most of his harvest over to his immediate Lord, retaining enough to survive, in return for protection from criminals, raiders, and warring royalty. With the exception of a few cities devoted to trade, the entire system was based upon primitive farming, and there exists no danger that we will return to any form of feudalism, neo or otherwise.

　

In fact, we should be so lucky. At least the serf had rights against his Lord, which could be enforced by the Church. He would not starve, and he received his protection. He had the security of land to which he was tied. On the other hand, late stage capitalism descends into fascism, which will be discussed in another diary entry, but is based upon modern industrial production, not agriculture. Anyone who tries to tell you we are moving into a new feudal or neo-feudal era is either very ignorant of history or trying to get you to believe in a non-linear view of human social evolution, a view that causes you to see a future at worst still better than the one faced by the Germans of WWII, instead of a future progressively far worse. Do not doubt for a second that that the United States will either descend into a magnificent fascism which will far exceed the brutality of the Nazi regime, or will emerge from this latest crisis as a fully functioning socialist economy with perhaps some remnants of capitalism remaining. This does not mean we will accurately label our status; we may call our new system anything imaginable. Nonetheless, it will be what it is. History does not move backwards, absent an extinction event. Feudalism is a past historical epoch and there it shall remain.

　

This is dry stuff, boring to most I presume. However, we must agree on the meaning of important terms in order to discuss political topics and solutions to contemporary social problems meaningfully. We should not use the term "radical right," but instead the term "reactionary right." This distinction marks a critical difference between the entire spectrum of the Left and the reactionary New Right, both the neo-conservative movement and the tea party movement. The traditional conservative, who is not reactionary, hardly exists anymore within the ranks of the modern Republican party.

　

We should stick with the traditional left/right paradigm used in most all political science classes, because it best explains how liberals and conservatives differ. When the right talks about something being socialist, such as redistributing wealth, we should know that this has nothing to do with socialism. And when someone states that we are moving toward feudalism or neo-feudalism, we should laugh out loud, unless we all expect soon to be farmers. The only reason for using the "feudalism" analogy is to avoid using the real terms involved in our present circumstance: capitalists, monopoly capitalism, accumulated capital, surplus capital, working class, class warfare, fascism and socialism. We will not become serfs any more than did the Jews in Germany. We will become cannon fodder, dispensable slaves in munitions factories, and unwanted bellies to feed. Under pure fascism, which is the form capitalism takes upon complete failure, the rule is fight and die, work until you die, or just die. We must stop sugar coating this reality with dreams of a return to feudalism, perpetual capitalism as the end of history, and reforming capitalism in a way that benefits the working class.

　

History demonstrates with profound certitude that capitalism has never been kind to the working class except when a strong socialist movement was able to force concessions from the capitalist class or face a revolution. Many make the mistake of thinking that capitalism brought us the profound wealth we enjoy. But what capitalist, in competition with his peers, just decided to offer the 40 hour work week, high wages, paid vacations, and all of the other benefits the wage earners of America have enjoyed, without himself going bankrupt in the process. In this regard, reading the history of the union movement is useful. Unions did not magically spring into existence, but were the creation of socialist organizers helping working class men and women to see their common interests in forming unions, and were only achieved through the courageous loss of life, limb and blood in pitched battles by those same men and women against U.S. troops, the Pinkertons, scabs, and organized crime. Without the protection of unions, and without a radical left to build them, we are as victims before a known serial killer. History teaches us, if we will listen, but we will never hear its message if we speak a different language.