Holy smokes was I not surprised by the decision this week by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. I was always suspicious of the argument that “money is not speech, it’s property,” though I repeated it several times. I agree with Bryan, in that I can’t really imagine that a pesky little thing like campaign finance law was slowing down the profound corporatization of the entire US public sphere. Everyone flipping out over this discussion sounds like Captain Renault. Yes, after a fashion it sucks to have what you already knew implicitly affirmed explicitly, but I’m skeptical that much will change. We’ll see.
If activists want to get angry and try to amend the Constitution, I would recommend leaving the First Amendment as it is and going against, instead, first, corporate personhood. Considering that there’s no qualification of abridging freedom of speech “for persons” in the First Amendment, I’m not sure that dismantling corporate personhood would fix the specific issues of this case, but it might help. Once that’s taken care of, it might make sense to work on solutions of limiting money’s influence when it is, you know, still property and not yet speech. I’m not sure what this would look like, as state-financed elections would just detach politicians from fund-raising–a well financed oppositional advocacy campaign could still sink the politician.
Either way, Glenn Greenwald is totally correct in that we respect the rule of law here, even when it generates results that are undesirable. But things like this are starting to make me wonder if, perhaps, democracy, while expert at enabling capitalism, does a terrible job of keeping it in check. I like Žižek’s take here:
Today we observe the explosion of capitalism in China and ask when it will become a democracy. But what if it never does? What if its authoritarian capitalism isn’t merely a repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, went on from the 16th to the 18th century, but a sign of what is to come? What if ‘the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market’ (Trotsky’s characterisation of tsarist Russia) proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if it shows that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and engine of economic development, but its obstacle?
Decisions like Citizens United mostly show what kind of world all you happy capitalists have sown. Enjoy reaping it.
Finally, despite being, from most accounts, already an anti-communist largely disillusioned with the left during the composition of The Big Money in the mid-1930s, Dos Passos still managed to remember what it felt like to be a beaten down activist in the fiftieth installment of “The Camera Eye” (and this is why I’m justifying writing this post), concerning the protests of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. So in case you feel like corporatization is something new, I quote at length, since it’s my blog:
they have clubbed us off the streets they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges America will not forget her betrayers) they hire the men with guns the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
all right you have won you will kill the brave men our friends tonight
there is nothing left to do we are beaten we the beaten crowd together in these old dingy schoolrooms on Salem Street shuffle up and down the gritty creaking stairs sit hunched with bowed heads on benches and hear the old words of the haters of oppression made new in sweat and agony tonight
our work is over the scribbled phrases the nights typing releases the smell of the printshop the sharp reek of newprinted leaflets the rush for Western Union stringing words into wires the search for stinging words to make you feel who are your oppressors America
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
their hired men sit on the judge’s bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
all right we are two nations
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch
but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight
the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died
if had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at streetcorners to scorning men. I might have died unknown, unmarked, a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as how we do by an accident
now their work is over the immigrants haters of oppression lie quiet in black suits in the little undertaking parlor in the North End the city is quiet the men of the conquering nation are not to be seen on the streets they have won why are they scared to be seen on the streets? on the streets you see only the downcast faces of the beaten the streets belong to the beaten nation all the way to the cemetery where the bodies of the immigrants are to be burned we line the curbs in the drizzling rain we crowd the wet sidewalks elbow to elbow silent pale looking with scared eyes at the coffins
we stand defeated America
Tags: america, bryan joiner, capitalism, citizens united v. fec, corporate personhood, free speech, Glenn Greenwald, John Dos Passos, money, Slavoj Žižek
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