“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels (1897- 1945, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda).
If Herr Goebbels rings a wake up bell, it is because the state and the corporate media can no longer “shield the people from the political, economicand/or military consequences of the lie.”
The lie — or the network of lies — that led the American people to believe that corporate capitalism is the best of all possible worlds is beginning to unravel.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is only a dramatic example of this awakening and the growing anger the people feel toward their economic situation and political leaders.
The last gasp of corporate rule is the attempt to shield the critical nature of the economic crisis by blaming it on greed and corruption. In their words there is nothing wrong with the system — it has been mismanaged and can be corrected by uncorrupted and less greedy people.
The capitalist system operates according to its laws and no political law can change an economic law. The capitalist system is based on the production and exchange of value. Value is produced by labor. The production by labor is exchanged with money, which is the measure of value of all production. The difference between the cost of the production of labor power and the amount of value that labor power creates is profit. Our entire society, production and exchange — all our social, political and legal institutions are built around or arise from this reality.
We are deep into an economic revolution (electronic production) that is doing away with value as it does away with labor. Since labor-less production increasingly cannot be exchanged on the basis of value, how are we to get our daily bread? Our society and all its institutions is increasingly out of sync with its changing economic foundation.
The economic revolution is producing a vast social revolution. The first stage is the step-by-step destruction of the existing order to make way for the new.
If anyone doubts this reality, look at the shuttered factories, the idle unemployed, the abandoned homes and the homeless families. Look at the polarization of wealth and poverty, and most of all look at the awakening social consciousness of the American people.
The problem we face is revolutionary.
We are at an historic fork in the road. It is either sink into some sort of electronic feudalism of corporate lords and serfs or build a whole new world of peace and freedom. The first step is to pass through simply being against the current rot and corruption and visualize what kind of a new world we can build with these marvelous new means of production. The tremendous response generated by OWS indicates the vast revolutionary potential of the people.
Can we, the revolutionaries add the intellectual ingredient to develop protest into change? This future is up to us!
