Thomas Paine, Naomi Klein, and capitalism
Introduction
Sometimes when living through troubling times it is good to revisit old friends. Lets talk about two friends, one very old, Thomas Paine (1737–1809), one alive and well, Naomi Klein. Both of them can help us deal with one of our biggest problems today, disaster capitalism. Start with Paine. Today’s political-economic changes make the past seem irrelevant and digging up a dead white male might appear a waste of time. But Paine, author of Common Sense, is part of the United States’ progressive political “DNA.” Paine’s political brilliance was often threatening to the powers that be. His courage and progressivism were so influential and threatening to privilege that, as with Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Karl Marx, and other great progressives, elites have long unsuccessfully tried to bury his more radical ideas. What does all this have to do with resisting disaster capitalism? The answer is that Paine, like Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, represents opposition to disaster capitalism and dedication to justice. More on that later.
First, what is disaster capitalism? Klein’s (no relation to this author) disaster capitalism concept is an important contribution to understanding the predatory, exploitive, and oppressive aspects of today’s capitalism. Her seminal book The Shock Doctrine is as much about ideology as it is about policy, politics, and economics. In her book we enter a frightening world (unfortunately quite real) of capitalist ideology in which policies empowering business are legitimated by false economic optimism. All this in support of profiteering at the expense of earth, community, life and limb for the many. The book shows that ideas supporting private economic interests hide crimes of the powerful. Throughout the work there are descriptions of harmful elite actions and interests being covered up, misleadingly presented, or ignored by state officials, media commentators and researchers.
Thus, ideology matters. Though words and thoughts (or the lack of them) don’t harm or oppress, they can assist harming and oppressing. Klein’s work exposes ideological happy talk — glowing rhetoric about how new policies will improve the economy, increase people’s opportunity, and promote freedom. For example, there have been false promises about deregulatory policies. There are grand predictions of the wonderful future that will result from neoliberalism. These have sought to legitimate escalating robbery by state and capital. Klein 1(p6) explains that disaster capitalism, emerging in the last few decades, consists of “… orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities…” Disaster capitalism is related to three dangerous political trends: elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations, and skeletal social spending 1(p18). In other words, disaster capitalism is a violent way of narrowing popular power, increasing the power of big capital, and minimizing spending on welfare, education, health, and other social needs. Klein’s book, and her work in general, are among the best tools for looking “under the hood” to clarify today’s social and political-economic trends.
Paine, though he is from the ancient past, can help us fight disaster capitalism by inspiring us with his lifelong devotion to social and political justice. Paine’s world two centuries ago was different than ours, but his broad political and economic criticisms and goals are in sync with Klein’s. To realize that Paine’s struggles are also partly ours assists us by reminding us that we are not alone seeking justice, and that though it is a long-term quest, there are successes. Like Klein, Paine reminds us that the fight against injustice is partly ideological.
Much the way Klein’s insights are marginalized by mainstream media, Paine during his life and since has been the subject of ideological erasing. The distortion of Paine and blurring the radicalism of other past heroes are part of erasing liberation struggles and people’s history. This is not due to a secret deep state, but to cultural and ideological forces promoted by upper class rule and a political economy based on exploitation and oppression. Politicians’, journalists’, and editors’ dependence on capitalism and status quo values insure that thinkers like Klein and Paine rarely get mentioned in mainstream media. This is why, for example, few realize Paine, though not socialist, criticized many “founding fathers” for limiting U.S. democracy, and that Paine advocated government protections from extreme inequality. Paine challenged hereditary power and its abuses and wrote about the need to fight injustice. He argued that government should not let people starve or be homeless.
Paine, like other radical democrats of his time, and like Klein today, wrote about injustice and conflict caused by unequal rights and property. In advocating equal rights, Paine 2 criticizes extremes of inequality as promoting “indignation and tumult”: “it is unnatural to believe that property can be secure under the guarantee of a society injured in its rights by the influence of that property.” In other words, like Klein, Paine believes that economic inequality promotes political inequality, and both cause conflict. Klein’s analysis of disaster capitalism emphasizes top-down violence by elites for profit and power. Paine often seems to worry about violence of the excluded resulting from resentment of oppression. But like Klein, Paine makes sure to point out that elites engage in criminal violence to protect their interests. Paine wrote that “… the origin of aristocracy was… robbery. The first aristocrats in all countries were brigands” 2.
A key lesson progressives teach us is that economic and political inequality are connected. Pretending this is not true is one way capitalism, including its disaster variant, lies about itself. In capitalist ideology, it is no threat to democracy and freedom that in the U.S. the richest 1% of families control 38.6% of the country’s wealth 3 or that the world’s 10 richest billionaires have more wealth than the total annual goods and services of most nations 4. In the real world, where Paine once roamed and Klein lives, economic inequality threatens democracy. Paine is aware, as he describes the problem, that there is tension between commerce and virtue 5(p46). Klein puts it more strongly, arguing that our current situation is characterized by violent often coordinated attacks by corporations and their allies on democracy and communities. Paine likely would agree with Klein that these are examples of economic inequality causing political inequality.
A great example of how ideology has been used against Paine is the selective remembering of his ideas. Paine’s emphasis on prosocial reciprocal interest as a basis for a harmonious and just society was connected to his view of commercial economic behavior, and was intended to regulate domestic and international relations 5(p94). Paine believed that the rule by the strongest in his time was not due to human nature, but to monarchy and aristocracy 5(p94). For Paine, part of making the politics of his time more just was to have a representative republic trading harmoniously with other nations and recognizing the duty to support the poor and not just rely on selfish individualistic right to property to do what it pleases 5(p94). In later writings, Paine was prescient in arguing for what many now call positive liberty — the use of government to offset inequality, and to provide programs to address social needs such as education, welfare, and unemployment assistance 5(p95). These ideas are drastically different from, and more progressive than, many current notions attempting to legitimate predatory and selfish policies. The ideological side of this includes that conservatives often quote Paine selectively favoring individual liberty and criticizing government to make him look like a free market fundamentalist. Some scholars have attempted to portray Paine as a rabid “individualist” by neglecting his ideas on sociability and mutual interdependence 5(p92). This benefits capitalists, disaster or otherwise, by erroneously making Paine into an ally of social Darwinism and an opponent of government social support. This is how someone who would surely be critical of disaster capitalism can be made to appear a supporter.
What about the repressive and authoritarian aspects of disaster capitalism? Many scholars, writers, and activists have pointed, like Klein, to fascistic features of current politics that endanger freedom. This includes elites promoting fear and in security worries and asserting that we have freedom while others are without it: “‘we’ have freedom but ‘they’ don’t,” “we must defend our freedom,” etc. One of Paine’s favorite concepts was freedom, something Klein appreciates too. Disaster capitalism is a perfect example of how the rhetoric of freedom is used ideologically. Freedom remains a key ideological tenet even in today’s world, where elites advocate everyday people giving up their liberties to get false security.
Paine is an example of the ideological abuse of hope, optimism, and universalism. Paine is a dramatic example of a political actor who had enormous influence, in part because of his economic optimism. Like many progressives, he was optimistic about the future being a time of agreement, fairness, and cooperation. Paine was a proponent of cosmopolitanism, a view that embraces diversity and advocates viewing oneself as a citizen of the world rather than of one nation 6. Ideology works in part by kidnapping such ideas. For example, an irony is that Paine’s famous phrase “my country is the world” 5(p88) which was a clarion call to radical progressive cosmopolitanism, can also be a slogan of disaster capitalists. For a disaster capitalist to say such a phrase would mean that he or she enjoys globalization and travel in a way that others cannot, and claiming privileged ownership and power.
Paine’s example teaches us about how the same idea can be reframed to an opposite purpose. Paine saw a bright future in a United States with broad voting rights and limited interference from government. We may differ with parts of his vision, but it is clear from his writing that he wanted real freedom and dignity for all. The happy future promised by disaster capitalists is more like a branding effort by organized crime — it’s hard to believe that those creating the advertising actually buy their rhetoric, given the gap between shining promises of economic flourishing and the resulting destructive human rights violations. Recent scholar Springer 7(p153) writes about today’s neoliberal capitalism: “[p]romises of utopia are confronted with the stark dystopian realities that exist in a growing number of countries where neoliberalization has not resulted in greater peace and prosperity, but in a profound and unmistakable encounter with violence.”
Another way Paine and Klein help us is independence. Not as in independence from Britain, but intellectual and political independence. Paine was a free floating intellectual with limited respect for established authority 5(p49). Klein is similar in that her brilliant analyses of todays political and economic issues are not held back by academic boundaries or political dogma. Being independent helps explain Klein and Paine’s insightful critical approaches and powerful impact. This reminds us that working against disaster capitalism means prying ourselves out of the cultural and ideological muck that we all swim in. Not impossible, just difficult.
Caution
Another way Paine and Klein can help is that they both offer a cautionary tale about identifying the threat to justice. Paine was a bit too optimistic about what he called “commercial society.” He thought that what we now call capitalism (in an early stage in his time) was progressive. It was, but it is much less so now. He thought commercial society should include government protection for the poor. It has, but in the disaster capitalism era those protections have been gutted. Klein 1(p24) makes a similar mistake, coming close to Paine in her recommendation for the good society. She believes that we can have market society without violence, and that a free market can coexist with free healthcare, public schools, and many other services in state hands. She writes that we can have a market while requiring corporations to pay decent wages and respect unions, and while using taxes to reduce sharp inequalities. So Paine and Klein argue for a mixed regulated economy, what some call social democracy. the problem is that if capitalist class profit and power are threatened, protections from capitalism that make like easier for the 99% get smashed.
Both Paine and Klein make the mistake of ignoring that the structural foundation of capitalism, like past social formations, is inherently exploitive. Klein’s book implies that our problem is not so much capitalism, but that capitalism took a terrible wrong turn in the latter half of the twentieth century. Klein does not make this claim, and arguably this impression is a result of her emphasizing the dramatic harmfulness of recent trends. The point is that in Klein’s book the harmfulness and predation appear new, as if rather suddenly economists and their government allies launched their disaster capitalism agenda. Klein neglects that predation, capitalist or otherwise, and its legitimation are rooted in upper class rule. Paine’s mistake was that he thought the newly established United States with its increased voting and freedoms would leave predatory politics and economics behind. Paine’s limited appreciation of upper class rule led to undue optimism. Both Klein and Paine believe free markets can be peaceful. Paine for example, wrote that the United States, what he called a “commercial country,” would not go to war.
Conclusion
Today’s progressive movements against neofascism and disaster capitalism can benefit from Paine’s and Klein’s idea that only active popular consent makes for justifiable government. Disaster capitalists and their allies at meetings like the World Economic Forum are clearly not examples of popular input into policy. So, Paine and Klein can assist people working against corporate globalization by being a respected source of arguments for people’s empowerment. Paine’s faith in the common possession of reason by all 5(p93) offer us a way to think about the influence of ideology and options for challenging it. Despite the common mainstream and rightwing suggestions that the common person and everyday citizen is ignorant or fickle, everyday people know more and can often reason better than they themselves realize. Common sense is often twisted by propaganda into nonsense. But common sense and people’s deliberations about issues can also, as exemplified by Paine’s most famous book, be part of a progressive democratic pushback against today’s disaster capitalism.
Paine’s sense of the dramatic and apocalyptic 5(p106) helped him get his message across and contribute to changing the world. Klein’s passionate and keen writing is doing the same. We all need to draw on Paine, Klein, and others to call attention to the severity and urgency of our current situation. We need to take the disaster out of capitalism, which will eventually require taking capitalism out of society.
Recommended Reading
1. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association. n.d. “The Thomas Paine National Historical Association.” The Thomas Paine National Historical Association. Retrieved April 22, 2018 (http://thomaspaine.org/). (The most comprehensive archive of Paine’s writing and Paine studies.)
2. Kaye, Harvey J. 2012. “Happy Birthday, Thomas Paine! Rich Conservatives Still Tremble at Your Name.” AlterNet, February 1. Retrieved January 28, 2018 (https://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/769667/happy_birthday,_thomas_paine!_rich_conservatives_still_tremble_at_your_name.).
References
1. Klein N. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books; 2007.
2. Paine T. Dissertation on the First Principles of Government. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association. http://thomaspaine.org/major-works/dissertation-on-the-first-principles-of-government.html. Published 1795. Accessed January 29, 2018.
3. Egan M. Record inequality: The top 1% controls 38.6% of America’s wealth. CNNMoney. http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/news/economy/inequality-record-top-1-percent-wealth/index.html. Published September 27, 2017. Accessed January 29, 2018.
4. Inequality.org. Global Inequality. Inequality.org. https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/. Accessed January 29, 2018.
5. Claeys G. Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge; 2004.
6. Turner BS, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 2006.
7. Springer S. The violence of neoliberalism. In: Handbook of Neoliberalism. London; New York: Routledge; 2016:153–163.
