September 01, 2001
After the protests: is capitalism the new bad guy?
The last two years have seen a string of mass protests, the most publicized of which has been the anti-WTO protest in Seattle. Amidst the picket signs and shattered McDonald’s storefronts, many are asking if global capitalism has its dark side.
Sociologist Carl Boggs thinks so. In The End of Politics, Boggs picks up a common theme: global capitalism is rapidly buying out civil society, and it may turn out to be an unfriendly merger. Boggs draws a haunting landscape. After neoliberal capitalism defeated the last of its ideological rivals roughly ten years ago, the US has radically depoliticized. American citizens—once active in various movements and political parties, as Tocqueville observed—have sought retreat in the purchased privacy of self-help, technology, and the shopping mall. What is left is a façade of functioning democracy that preserves all of the symbolic trappings (elections, campaigns, political parties), but none of the content (deep dialogue, engaged citizenry, empowered communities).
The last decade saw a steady stream of corporate mergers, two notable ones being Microsoft’s purchase of General Electric (and thus NBC) and the AOL-TimeWarner merger. Fewer and fewer hands control more and more media. The quality of public debate portrayed in the media cannot help but diminish, even as editorial safeguards are reviewed and renewed. Coupled with the high mobility of a nation of citizens-as-consumers, the media mergers lead to a hollow democracy, if it can be considered democracy at all.
But this is only to describe life as we know it among the giants. Consider also the hopes attached to the internet, the flagship (until very recently) of multinational corporations. The information revolution was seen as providing a solution to a whole host of contemporary problems: economic crises, military conflicts, learning disorders, health problems, environmental decay, and depoliticization (15).
And to think that religious folk attribute all that to a deity! In a similar vein, imagine for a moment that Boggs was describing not multinational corporations but a group of religious organizations, say those denominations represented in the National Council of Churches, or those with significant participation in Focus in the Family or the Christian Coalition. The protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa would pale in comparison.
Among society’s ills, depoliticization receives the bulk of the book’s attention. This new antipolitics involves a wide ranging set of cultural trends, including heightened interest in hyper-individualistic spirituality, the limitation of organized community action to the realm of property value concerns, faith that technology will solve most any problem, and academia’s fascination with postmodern thought. Even the recent anti-WTO protests seem to have a sporadic, undisciplined nature that separates them from the successful political movements of the past century.
Boggs paints with a broad brush at first, but the book soon settles down to explore all of this in detail. The problem with depoliticization, he says, is that it is a direct threat to democracy itself. And the perpetrator of depoliticization is no less than multinational capitalism.
The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere.
By Carl Boggs. Guilford, 310pp. $23.95.
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