The Fateful Dance of Capitalism & Democracy
             -- a wake-up call to citizens everywhere --  
             
                © 1996 by Richard K. Moore
                         20 March 1996
                             
            As published in New Dawn, September-October 1996



Democracy: An Uneasy Partnership

       All around the mulberry bush,
           the monkey chased the weasel.
       The monkey thought it was all in fun,
           Pop! goes the weasel.

Consider the dance which has been been going on between what I would 
call the elite and the people since the middle of the 18th century.  
As the feudal era was ending, the elites included royalty, the 
churches, the land-aristocracy, and the business-wealthy -- and their 
hold over the people was essentially total.  This is the context out 
of which democracy arose.

What happened is that certain elites were out to re-divide the elite 
pie, cutting themselves the lion's share, and cutting out others 
altogether.  Essentially, the emerging business-wealthy were tired of 
butting up against the older hierarchies, and began to favor 
republics as a better environment for the further development of 
capitalism.  But this business-oriented sub-elite needed allies in 
order to make a grab for power.

They turned to the people themselves, and offered them a partnership 
in a new regime.  The people provided the manpower to overthrow the 
old regimes, and received in return the promise of a democratic 
republic -- liberty, equality, fraternity, and all that.

The United States and France led the way, and demonstrated two quite-
different paths to a modern republic.  Eventually, the rest of the 
Western world followed suit, and the modern "democracy" has become a 
seemingly permanent -- and dominant -- political structure.

Once the other elites were ousted, what remained was an uneasy and 
unequal partnership between the business-elite and the people.  It 
was this surviving elite which drafted the new constitutions, and 
provided most of the political and economic leaders of the new 
republics.  They indeed made sure royalty, nobility, and the church 
were dislodged from power -- by the pen in the States, and by the 
guillotine in France.  But their commitment to democracy has been 
more questionable.

The adversarial nature of the partnership became clear right away -- 
when the U.S. Constitution was first drafted in 1789 -- without a 
bill of rights.  The elite had already betrayed the people, and the 
people had to rise up to demand their promised democratic guarantees.   
Ever since, there's been a tug-of-war for control.  Sometimes the 
elite reigns supreme, as in mid 19th century America.  Other times 
people managed to elect effective representatives, as in Britain 
during the 1950s.


The Age of Development
The age of democratic republics has been the great age of modern 
"progress", or more accurately, development -- the development of new 
technologies, products, organizational structures, transport systems, 
etc.  Development has provided benefits to both people and 
capitalism: people have experienced rising prosperity while 
capitalism has realized astronomical growth in wealth.  Nonetheless, 
the partnership has not been an equal one.

While some of the people in the larger countries have found this to 
be an age of prosperity, many others, especially in the Third World, 
have experienced it as involuntary exploitation and poverty.  And 
while some benefits have been shared around the table, ownership and 
control have been concentrated in the hands of the elite.

With the aid of technology, the elite has steadily increased its 
level of ownership and control.  There are three technologies, in 
particular, whose development has been the most useful to the elite: 
propaganda, corruption, and the corporation.

Propaganda permits popular opinion to be managed, hence controlling 
the democratic process at its roots, where candidates and issues are 
debated.

Corruption permits politicians and government officials to be 
controlled, which undermines the democratic process at its head, 
where decisions are made and action is taken.

The corporation is the ultimate money-multiplying machine: a legally 
sanctioned entity whose only guiding value is greed, and whose only 
purpose is to generate wealth -- not for its managers or workers, but 
for its (limited liability) owners.

Thus modern "democracies" have served as the vehicles supporting the 
growth of capitalism.  Controlled via propaganda and corruption, the 
nation state has been harnessed to expand investment opportunities, 
while the corporation has evolved to exploit those opportunities.

Western nations have been the fortresses of the corporate elite, and 
imperialism has been the means of expanding investment opportunities 
abroad.  Warfare has been the "jockeying for imperial turf" among the 
nation-fortresses, on behalf of their resident capitalists.  It is a 
tribute to the power of propaganda (including the "educational" 
system) that most of us think of these modern wars as having had 
other causes.

But competition among growing powers for finite territory cannot go 
on forever.  By the end of World War Two the inevitable finally 
happened -- one nation achieved military and economic dominance of 
the globe.  By skillfully playing off one power against another, and 
bringing to bear its own industrial might at just the right moments, 
the United States managed to emerge from the conflagration perceived 
as the "Savior of Democracy", with its economy and infrastructure 
intact, in control of the seas, and in a position to reshape the 
world according to its own designs.

As usual, events proceeded at both a real level and a propaganda 
level.  According to the propaganda line, the post-war era has been 
one of emerging independent nations, increased international 
cooperation (symbolized by the U.N.), and the dismantlement of prewar 
empires ... a flowering of democracy.

The reality has been the installation of a new system of collective 
imperialism, under the aegis of a nuclear-tipped Pax Americana -- a 
new world order in which national-rivalry capitalism has been 
replaced by globalized capitalism operating in a corporate-managed 
"free world" economy.

"Free world" is the propaganda term; "free-to-invest realm" would be 
the capitalist perspective, and the more descriptive term, given that 
democratic freedom is hardly characteristic of most countries which 
operate under this system.

Now that the "communist" block is being digested into the greater 
scheme of things, we can see that the whole Cold War was a 
distracting side-show.  The main effect of the cold war, in the end, 
was to provide an excuse for a large U.S. military.

The actual purpose of the U.S. military has been to act as the police 
force to expand and protect the extent of the free-investment world, 
and to insure that all the little "free" nations remain hospitable to 
corporate investments.  That most of these nations are not democratic 
is of no consequence to the elite, except that it makes the world 
easier to manage.


The Rise of Globalism
Thus arose a de facto corporate globalist regime, with Uncle Sam as 
the volunteer vigilante enforcer of a semi-open world-market system.  
This regime has matured and evolved over the past 50 years, and is 
now in the process of incorporating the last hold-out countries into 
its fold.  During this period, all three primary technologies have 
been globalized: propaganda, corruption, and the corporation.

Global corporations, or multinationals, are familiar to everyone.  
They are of immense size -- of the top fifty world economies, nearly 
half are corporations, not nations -- and they increasingly have no 
loyalty to any "home" country.

Propaganda -- including Hollywood productions and mass-media "news" -
- is increasingly global in scope, presenting a centrally-
manufactured corporate party line to the world's people.

Corruption -- the elite corporate domination of public institutions -
- focuses more and more at the international level, setting up 
institutions (NAFTA, GATT, IMF, NATO, Brussels) which are designed to 
serve corporate objectives and which operate outside the dominion of 
national states.

One more primary technology -- weaponry -- deserves mention at this 
point.  Until recently, enforcement of elite globalist schemes 
required massive armed forces, and involved wars which might take 
years to carry out.  As was demonstrated in Iraq (following 
rehearsals in Grenada and Panama), it is now possible for a 
relatively small force, equipped with modern hi-tech weapons, to 
devastate an entire modern nation in a short time.  This reduces the 
effort that must be put into propaganda and minimizes the number of 
people who need to be convinced or coerced into participating in the 
policing effort.

The voluntary Uncle Sam vigilante role is being rapidly converted 
into an internationally-sanctioned strike force.  With the help of 
stealth weaponry, cruise missiles, and satellite intelligence -- 
backed up by well-crafted propaganda/news management -- policing of 
the globalist regime is to be carried out by an elite-controlled, 
Judge Dredd death machine.  Any nation which proves inconvenient to 
the elite will be demonized by the media, brought to its knees by the 
strike force, re-organized by international commissions, and then re-
integrated into the globalist "community".

 
The Destabilization of the Nation State
By means of these developments, the de facto globalist regime, run 
unilaterally by the U.S., is being solidified into a formal globalist 
regime.  This historic global transformation is being heralded by an 
intense propaganda campaign, launched by Reagan and Thatcher, and 
selling the imaginary virtues of "market forces", "competitiveness", 
"privatization", and "reform".  By focusing the propaganda spotlight 
on economic issues, the more significant political changes receive 
relatively little public notice.

The true significance of the globalization campaign is no less than 
an historic political revolution -- the strong nation state is being 
discarded, to be replaced by smaller, weaker states with more and 
more of their sovereign powers taken over by the corporate elite and 
their technocrat commissions.  Since the nation state no longer 
serves its function as the fortress of capitalism, the democracy-
based partnership between people and capitalism is being dissolved, 
leading to a new era of global corporate feudalism.

The strong nation state has become more of a hindrance than a benefit 
to the modern mega-corporation.  It is the dominant nations which 
advance the standards in environmental protection, worker's rights, 
and other such "emotional" and "inefficient" measures.  Small, weak 
nations are more amenable to rape and pillage by corporate 
developers, and the Third World is the elite's prototype of how 
they'd like the whole world to operate.

 
"Reform": The Death Knell of Democracy
Maastricht, Scottish independence, ethnic or regional autonomy, 
stronger international "peace" arrangements -- these are all 
developments which might have much to be said for them taken in 
isolation, or if implemented within a democratic framework.  But 
within the context of the corporate elite storming the Bastille of 
democracy, it is necessary to re-examine all changes and "reforms" 
from the perspective of whether they strengthen or weaken our 
fundamental democratic institutions.  If we don't look at the big 
picture, then we'll be like the frog who submits to being cooked -- 
the victim of a sneaky slow-boiling policy.

The fact is that the modern nation state is the most effective 
democratic institution mankind has been able to come up with since 
outgrowing the small-scale city-state.  With all its defects and 
corruptions, this gift from the Enlightenment -- the national 
republic -- is the only effective channel the people have to power-
sharing with the elites.

If the strong nation-state withers away, we will not -- be assured -- 
enter an era of freedom and prosperity, with the "shackles of 
wasteful governments off our backs".  No indeed.  If you want to see 
the future -- in which weak nations must deal as-best-they-can with 
mega-corporations -- then look at the Third World.

The last thing you see in Third-World countries is freedom and 
prosperity.  What you in fact see are governments which increasingly 
specialize in two functions: suppressing the population, on the one 
hand, while on the other hand they negotiate with the international 
financial community and corporate investors.

When all nations have been whittled down and made weak, then the 
world will have become essentially a patchwork of plantation-states.  
We'll have a neo-feudal system where the corporate elite act as a 
kind of global royalty, extracting tribute from all the little 
competing nation-fiefdoms.

There is a brief window of opportunity -- while modern democracies 
continue to survive -- in which the people can wake up and peacefully 
seize control of their governments.  After those governments have 
been devolved/downsized, it will be too late.  And with modern 
weaponry under the command of the elite, there will be no possibility 
of the people arising anew in revolution.

If the people in any of the little fiefdoms try it, they'll be dealt 
with as Iraq has been in the Gulf War and its aftermath.  It won't be 
nice to mess with Earth Inc!  Preservation of strong national 
sovereignty in the modern democracies is the rock-bottom foundation 
needed by the people -- without it democracy will without doubt 
disappear from the world.