The Sanctity of Small Businesses

I have written previously about the concept of the “middle class” and how it is strategically used by politicians to create divisions and distort reality. The concept of the “small business” works in a very similar way, and I think it is important to highlight its function in political rhetoric. This is on my mind particularly because pretty much every political discussion I have heard lately has had some sort of appeal to the effects of various proposals on small businesses.

If anyone were unfamiliar with American society, a few hours watching any cable news channel would be enough to show them the great reverence in which small businesses are held. In fact, it seems that the most effective attack one can launch on any proposed policy or regulation is to demonstrate its negative impact on small businesses. One would think that small businesses must be the engine of the American economy.

They are not. Of course, it is not hard to see why everyone likes small businesses: they are the exemplars of entrepreneurialism, individualism, and free market laissez-faire capitalism. They stand in opposition to the corruption, human rights abuses, and political finagling of large corporations. Even the most die-hard capitalist apologists have a hard time defending those evil multinational corporations who ship American jobs overseas. Thank goodness there are small businesses to salvage the ideals of capitalism.

So part of the political usefulness of the concept of small business lies in its very appeal. People see capitalist virtue embodied in small business. The “small business” is a loaded ideological symbol which, as a discursive element, conjures up associations with cherished values and some old-timey nostalgia to boot. This can be compared to the appeal of the “middle class,” though the latter also draws its discursive power from the fact that most everyone identifies themselves as members of the middle class.

However, like the concept of “middle class,” the notion of the “small business” serves an important ideological purpose in addition to those more immediate and practical ends. The constant references to small businesses bolster false images of capitalism. It counters the reality that capitalism’s nature is to increasingly centralize capital, to nourish monopolies, to exploit and dominate. It discounts the importance of mega-conglomerates in economic, political, and social spheres. Moreover, it reroutes conversations away from analyses of the ways in which corporations secure their wealth and manipulate social structures, and focuses discussion instead on misguided notions about the inherent conflict between government and business.

The truth is, that capitalism has been the greatest threat to free markets and small businesses.

Why I'm Not Voting

This is the one day of the year where people feel no shame about encroaching on strangers with personal questions laden with implicit moral judgements.  I lost count of how many times random people asked me if I'd voted yet. Equally irksome, I spent the entire day listening to trite sermonizing on the importance of voting. Of course, I never told anyone I wasn't planning to vote. That offense is ranked, I think, slightly below pedophilia, and I am not prepared to destroy my reputation.

Why does voting fill people with such a sense of pride? Why is it justified on moral terms? After all, most any close-minded ignoramus, misanthrope, or psychopath can go to a local high school gym and bubble in a scantron. Any person can vote with the most self-interested, destructive, hateful ends in mind. Following dominant logic, someone who voted for George Wallace purely on account of being racist still performed a noble deed. Why is the value of voting never questioned? Voting is a hallowed sacrament in modern societies because it serves an important ideological purpose: sustaining illusions of progress, enlightenment, self-determination, and empowerment in the midst of historically unprecedented conditions of oppression.

The brainwashing has been quite successful, aided of course by the blunting of most people's capacities for critical thought.  Anyone who believes our education system and national media are eroding in effectiveness need to think again.  They are doing their jobs very well.

1. People either do not consider the fact that campaign rhetoric does not predict real actions, or they deem this fact to be ultimately irrelevant.

2. People do not realize that important decisions are shaped by external factors and institutional constraints, and NOT by a person occupying an office; they are ignorant of the continuity across different presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican (the Obama administration was a continuation of the Bush administration, which was a continuation of the Clinton administration, and so on.)

3. People are not phased by the limitation of having only two viable options (in most cases); the fact that these choices have been selected for them by party leaders and corporate kingmakers is of no concern; and the frustration they feel that these options do not reflect their own interests and desires does not give people pause.

Let me emphasize this point. Voting is a selection between two corporate-sponsored options that will both serve the same corporate-driven interests. Voting allows people to participate in their own oppression. What shelters this reality from popular recognition is the spectacle of political campaigns.

Campaigns serve two key functions:

1. They camouflage reality (i.e. the fact that the candidates are not fundamentally different) in order to persuade people that they have a "voice" (whatever that means...). Campaigns create the illusion of variety and choice.

2. They set the terms of public discourse. The hegemony of modern thought is constituted by a complex of ideologies and discourses that is structured around two oppositional nodes.  Campaign rhetoric is critical to the process of redefining the bounds of modern discourse and reorienting the nodes to suit changing circumstances. In essence, the debates, stump speeches, and ads serve to determine what sorts of things the public thinks and how they talk about it, and equally important, what they cannot think and say. The heart of public discourse, the structured opposition, is created by distorting the significance of small details, thereby allowing many significant matters of foundational importance to fly under the radar as "givens" and thus effectively block them from reaching the level of conscious reflection. The domain of popular consciousness is entirely saturated with inane, trivial details. As a result, most people are not able to think critically about social reality. The liberal/conservative dichotomy actually curtails freedom of thought more than it represents any real flowering of opinions.

Real change goes beyond the political process. It radically transforms all institutions, economic, political and social. I'm not going to thank the people who voted today. I thank all the people who refuse to accept the "options" that are given to them, who take the time to think past the sound bites with which they are saturated, and who will not compromise what they know is right.

U.S. Political Debates

Just a brief interlude from recent topics, because I want to make a comment about political debates in the U.S.

Since now it is not possible to accommodate any diversity of opinion within either political party, debates no longer serve the purpose of setting forth candidates' positions on the issues.  However, as I watched the Republican debate last night, I thought about how well debates function as a means of consolidating and propagating ideology.  When the same ideas are expressed repeatedly by all candidates, and in nearly identical terms, those ideas are more likely to seem right and common sensical.  Even the most intelligent people are more apt to draw on the discourses that already surround them rather than create their own anew.  Thus, just by sheer repetition these political soundbites become embedded in the popular conscious and dominate the way people think and talk about the social order.  We hear the politicians stress over and over that government is not able to create and innovate as well as the "private sector" and consequently we take this "truth" for granted.  We don't consider how this distinction is tautological, as "private sector" is defined merely as that which is not "government," even if differences in substance do not apply.  We do not think about how corporations run the government, and how government has only ever existed as a tool of the dominant/wealthy.  And as a result, we accept an explanation of social problems that is based on nonsensical categories and nonexistent relationships.

Of course, it is clear that the moderators are totally in on the game, as the quality of their questions only encourage these prefabricated, thoughtless answers.