Chris Hedges: Inverted Totalitarianism Excerpt from a lecture Death of the liberal class. http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_on_the_death_of_the_liberal_class_201 01018/?

ln Apocalyptic violence, magic, an embrace of a historical and personal destiny, a culture that communicates through image and spectacle, is a totalitarian culture. We have created, in the words of a great political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, a system of inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism is different, he writes, from classical totalitarianism, it doesnt find its expression in demagogue or a charismatic leader, but in the anonymity of a corporate state. In inverted totalitarianism you have corporate systems, that proport to pay loyalty and fielty to the constitution and electoral politics, and a language and iconography of american patriotism and nationalism, but have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizens impedent(?). What we have undergone is a coup dtat in slow motion. And we have lost and they have won. In inverted totalitarianism economics trump politics, which is different from classical totalitarianism, where politics trump economics. And with that inversion comes a different form of ruthlessness. The commodification of american culture, the commodification of human beings, whose worth is defined by the market, as well as the commodification of the natural world, whose worth is defined by the market, means that each will be exploited by corporate power until exhaustion or collapse. Which is why the environmental crisis is intimately linked to the economic crisis. Societies that cannot regulate capitalist forces, as Marx understood, cannibalize themselves untill they die. And thats what we are undergoing. I want to end by speaking a little bit about resistance - what that means? I hope by now, most of you have seen through the facade of Barrack Obama, who functioned for the corporate state as a brand. He, I think, in many ways, was simillar to what wee saw by Benneton or Calvin Klein who used people of colour or HIV positive models as a way to associate their products with risky style and progressive politics. But the result was the same. It was to confuse the passive consumer that a brand was the experience. Which is why just before Obama assumed office, Advertising Age awarded Obama their top annual award. He beat Nike, Apple, and thats marketer of the year. We are not going to salvage either our environment or our country through electoral politics. I had lunch, recently, in New York with father Daniel Berrigan, and I was asking him if he had followed the elections and he quoted his brother Phill and said if voting was so effective it would be illegal. I think that from now on all resistance is local. Food will become very soon a major political weapon. We are already creating in these post-industrial pockets food deserts. I wrote a story for the Nation magazine, that they (still) keep holding, on Camp(?) in New Jersey(?) which per capita is the poorest city in the country as well as the most dangerous, and theres no supermarket. The only outlets to eat are Churches(?) fried chicken and local doughnut shops. Its essentially fat, grease. This is true in West Virginia, in the places that have been coaled out, banks have packed out and laughed, the communities themselves are falling into irreparable decay and these post-industrial pockets are growing, expanding at a greater and greater rate. And the corporate state is not going to step in to do anything to ammeliorate the suffering, the human misery, that it causes. Thats gonna be our job.

We are going to have to begin to build locally. We are going to have to remember, that true correctives to American democracy have never come from the top down. That the question, as the great philosopher Karl Popper wrote, is not how do we get good people to rule. Most people, Popper writes correctly, who are attracted by the power are at best mediocre which is Obama, or venal, which is Bush. The question is How do we make the powerful afraid of us. All of the social movements that were built, starting with the liberty party, that fought slavery, suffragettes for the womens rights, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, made the powerful frightened of them. Which is why the last truly liberal president in the US was Richard Nixon, because he was actually scared of movements and passed OCEA(?) and Clean Water act and Mine and Safety act, all of which were written by Ralph Nader (who I woted for in the last election), and we have to recover that. We have to remember that it is not our job to take power, thats not our job. Our job is to remain fast around the moral imperatives that we do not compromise on. It is our job to defend a dispossessed working class. It is our job to defend sick children. It is our job to defend those, who are being tortured, abused and killed in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, because of our rapatious and out-of-control war economy. And we have to be willing to get up and make personal sacrifices on behalf of these moral imperatives even if at first we become pariahs. That is the only hope left. Anybody who is foolish enough that going to a ballot box at this point and voting for a democratic candidate is going to change anything, I think, is living in a universe, that is as non reality-based as that of the christian right. And if we can recover that ethic, if we can understand that rebellion or resistance is a way to safeguard our own integrity, our own individuality, if we can look down the long term and say maybe not in our lifetime, but we will carry this for the generations that come after, then, I think, we can speak about hope. If we refuse to do this, if we remain passive and complaceant, than, I think, both our nation and finally the eco-system, that sustains human life, is doomed.