Everything is Not Fine
Back in the day I used to enjoy watching old anti-communist films for a laugh. One of my favourites was Make Mine Freedom, a 1948 U.S. propaganda cartoon produced by John Sutherland and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which was established in 1934 by the then president and CEO of General Motors. The cartoon depicts a worker, capitalist, politician, and farmer all hoodwinked by Dr. Utopia to try his formula “Ism”, which he promises will solve all their problems in exchange for signing away their freedom. “John Q. Public” overhears their conversation and shows Utopia’s prospective buyers the totalitarian state that would result from imbibing “Ism”.
I thought of Make Mine Freedom recently when thinking about the current push by the capitalist ruling class to maintain a sense of “normalcy” as society crumbles around us. Specifically, I was reminded of the scene when, in the nightmarish world of “Ism”, the elected official who warns about the loss of freedom is turned into “State Propaganda Speaker 3120”. The giant hand of the state silences his voice and replaces it with a broken record that plays the same repeated message: “Everything is fine. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.”
Coincidentally, this week also marked the 10th anniversary of KC Green’s famous Gunshow comic “On Fire”, which depicts a smiling dog in the middle of a burning house saying, “This is fine.” The cartoon quickly became an enduring meme—possibly the most iconic representation of the delusional worldview that informs late capitalism as the planet literally burns around us.
Even when it was produced, after the U.S. emerged from World War II as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, Make Mine Freedom had more than a hint of projection to it. The very message of the cartoon is that “everything is fine” in America. “Sure, our system of free enterprise isn’t perfect,” John Q. Public generously acknowledges. Even at the height of U.S. global dominance that saw sustained economic growth and a general rise in living standards, the country was rife with poverty, inequality, institutional racism (lynchings, segregation under Jim Crow), and state repression that culminated in the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism.
Still, in the context of the post-war boom, it was possible for someone to say with a straight face the narrator’s concluding words: “Working together to produce an ever greater abundance of material and spiritual values for all—that is the secret of American prosperity.” In his book Marxism and the U.S.A., Alan Woods notes that this period of economic upswing decisively shaped the consciousness of Americans:
For decades, American capitalism seemed to be “delivering the goods”. The economy was growing rapidly and the recessions were so shallow and fleeting that they were barely noticed. Living standards were increasing. There was an abundance of things like refrigerators, televisions, telephones and cars that made people feel prosperous.
The feeling that “we have never had it so good” was reinforced by what Americans could see in the rest of the world. Whenever anybody complained, the defenders of the established order could point triumphantly to Stalinist Russia, that monstrous bureaucratic and totalitarian caricature of socialism and say: “You want socialism? That’s socialism for you – dictatorship and the rule of an autocratic bureaucracy! You will be slaves of the state. Is that what you want?” And even the most critical American worker would shake his or her head and conclude that the devil they knew was probably a lot better than the one they didn’t.
Today, that situation has turned into its opposite. The United States is a society in decline. We see rising rates of poverty, hunger, disease, mass shootings, anxiety, depression, and pessimism about the future. More than 1.1 million Americans have died of COVID-19, contributing to a sharp drop in life expectancy. Where its living standards after the Second World War made it the envy of the world, the United States today has the lowest life expectancy and highest child mortality rate of any rich country. Its private, for-profit health-care system, unique among the advanced capitalist countries, has created a situation where tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford health care.
Ruling class delusion
Faced with these unpleasant truths, the shapers of U.S. public opinion, mouthpieces for the ruling class, have become ever more delusional. Establishment hack and veteran New York Times columnist David Brooks offered a masterclass in ignoring reality this week with his piece in The Atlantic: “Despite Everything You Know, America is on the Right Track”. Though most of the article is behind a paywall, Brooks suggests in the opening that negativity is “ingrained in American media culture” because stoking anger and fear is a surefire way to build an audience. That observation is not wrong in and of itself, but Brooks’s overall argument is idealist: Americans are angry and fearful because those ideas are promoted by the media, not due to material conditions that have seen their living conditions deteriorate. Like most mainstream pundits, Brooks chooses to ignore reality in a matter no different from “State Propaganda Speaker 3120”. His overriding message is: Everything is fine. I suppose that might be true if you’re a wealthy columnist like David Brooks.
Of course, it’s not just the United States. The perpetuation of any system requires the notion that the current order is good; that sure, the system “isn’t perfect”, but everything is basically alright. As living standards decline, COVID rages, and the climate crisis intensifies, the need to ignore reality has become more and more obvious. I’ve written before about our culture of mass infection and the abandonment of all public-health measures. 2022 was the deadliest year of the pandemic in Canada and saw children’s hospitals overwhelmed by a triple onslaught of respiratory illnesses including COVID-19, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus. Yet few are still wearing masks, and officials refuse to consider any new public-health measures to reduce infections.
The profits must flow
I read a great article recently, “Let Them Eat Plague!”, which sums up why the ruling class is obliged to create a sense of “normalcy” in order to keep the economy running and profits flowing:
The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. The capitalist system depends on constant growth: constant production, constant consumption, constant expansion of profits. Even brief pauses — such as a month-long stay-at-home order — have disastrous effects on capital. Implementing the mass prevention strategies necessary to slow down transmission (daily rapid testing, contact tracing, guaranteed paid leave for exposed workers, high-quality respirators, etc.) is expensive, and eats into profits. An information campaign explaining why everyone needs to stay home, instead of contributing to “the economy,” eats into profits further. Winding down all non-essential business and keeping it shuttered until the true end of the pandemic would contract the economy down to only what is necessary for society to function. The opportunities for financial capital to invest in new, profitable enterprises would vanish faster than they reemerge.
For capitalism to function, it requires two things: a steady supply of workers producing value and an unending flow of consumption to realize that value as profit for the capitalist. The onset of a pandemic presented a challenge on both of those fronts. Workers getting sick en masse and being forced to stay home for a couple of weeks — or even dying or becoming disabled and exiting the workforce altogether — was only one potential headache for the capitalist class. Far worse was the prospect of workers staying home out of precaution, thereby grinding production to a halt. Consumers staying home and buying only the essentials would prevent the realization of profits across huge swathes of the economy, cutting off the flow of capital necessary to keep the whole system running.
The moment it became obvious to market analysts that COVID was more than just a local Chinese outbreak, it triggered utter panic in the financial sector. Fears about the slowdown of profits led to several mass stock sell-offs from investors, lowering stock value, triggering even more panic-selling, across multiple different days. This wasn’t just speculation: decreased demand for oil rapidly triggered a massive price war that caused prices to spiral for months until becoming negative, with the holders of oil futures paying to offload their contracts. Without ramping demand back up, production of this and other key commodities would be financially toxic.
Capitalism also relies on a reserve army of labor to keep labor costs artificially deflated. A contracted economy, in which any worker willing to work is a rare commodity, tips the balance of power in favor of workers. Workers could more easily bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions (including liberal COVID leave). Most worryingly of all, in the context of long-term precautionary measures, the population would get used to a dangerous notion — that we have value beyond our labor and our consumption. When faced with the prospect of death or disability, the contradictions become sharpened in our eyes. Hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly ask “Why am I risking my life for this?” The frustration at a choice between abject poverty and potentially contracting a debilitating condition would galvanize workers to stand up for our rights. Waves of labor mobilization, rent strikes, workplace lockouts, boycotts, and more would sweep the country — and the world. It would be the greatest challenge to the political power of the capitalist class in a century.
The article goes on:
Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.
Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.
There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.
The same factors that compel ruling classes to minimize COVID also inform the decision to ignore the accelerating climate crisis, where just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global carbon emissions. It’s not a matter of being ignorant of the science: politicians have access to the same information the rest of us do. They’re perfectly aware what the consequences of their actions will be. But the state is an instrument of the ruling class to defend their interests. The simple fact is that the global economy runs on fossil fuels, and their continued extraction and use is too profitable to the capitalist class for governments to make the large-scale changes needed to transition as quickly as possible to sustainable energy.
However, politicians are aware that the masses are worried about the climate crisis. So they’ll mouth empty platitudes and pretend to take action to reduce carbon emissions, while enacting policies that do the exact opposite. Justin Trudeau has mastered this cynical strategy—proclaiming himself an environmentalist while spending at least $21.4 billion in public money to buy a pipeline built in violation of Indigenous rights, and using police to crush any resistance.
Sadly, many are fooled by the rhetoric of figures like Trudeau or Joe Biden, paying attention to what politicians say and not what they do. There is a desire to believe that if there is a serious problem, governments will respond. People hear leaders talk about carbon taxes or “cap and trade” and believe such miniscule efforts, which amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and may even hurt the working class, will solve the problem. The alternative—that those in charge of our governments are actively accelerating a climate crisis that will make much of our planet uninhabitable and result in unimaginable suffering—is too terrifying to contemplate.
Normalcy bias
Jessica Wildfire has written about the psychological phenomenon of “normalcy bias”. We tend to believe people will panic when faced with a crisis. The reality is often people instead shut down, mill around, and avoid taking action. Wildfire quotes an article by journalist Amanda Ripley: “Large groups of people facing death act in surprising ways. Most of us become incredibly docile… Usually, we form groups and move slowly, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare.”
Psychologists have speculated on the reasons for this tendency. They suggest we evolved to focus on immediate and visible threats, not threats like a global pandemic or climate emergency that can be relegated to the background. Social shaming can reinforce normalcy bias. Carl Ross writes in the Journal of Community & Public Health that humans “are sensitive to the perception of others viewing us as abnormal. Within social relationships, very few want to be seen as alarmist, overreactive or a fool because if they are wrong about a threat then they will be regarded as less credible in the future.” Unfortunately, ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away. Instead they get bigger and bigger until they become impossible to ignore, at which point the consequences can be far worse.
When it comes to government inaction in the face of the pandemic, the climate crisis, or any number of other existential threats, it can be easy to blame the masses and fall back on the old nostrum that “people get the government they deserve.” But to imagine that governments always reflect the will of “the people” is so at odds with reality it barely merits consideration. A majority of Canadians, for example, support a return to mask mandates if COVID-19 cases increase over the winter, but federal and provincial governments—whether Liberal, Conservative, NDP, or CAQ—have unanimously dismissed mask mandates out of hand. Conversely, the so-called “Freedom” Convoy that occupied Ottawa last winter and called for an end to all COVID-related public health measures was wildly unpopular, yet governments across party lines acquiesced to their demands. Leon Trotsky long ago answered the suggestion that governments always reflect the popular will:
There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and furthermore that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in one and the same direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc. arise.
Every government has to pretend “everything is fine” to justify its own rule. The same applies to systems of government and modes of production. Whatever its problems, we are told, the current system is better than any alternative.
In addition, human consciousness is inherently conservative and lags behind events. People tend to be averse to change and stick with what is most familiar with them. Hence the just-world hypothesis, the cognitive bias which assumes that “people get what they deserve.” Revolutionary change is a scary prospect. It’s only when the existing order becomes intolerable that the masses take matters into their own hands and enter the stage of history, which is precisely what a revolution is.
Growing anger
The good news is that there is an increasing recognition among the masses that radical change is necessary. The collapse of the centre and rise of populism on both the left and right is an expression of growing anger against a system people correctly feel has abandoned them, and which is searching for an outlet. Despite all the propaganda and increasing censorship—itself an indication of the ruling class’s growing lack of faith in its own system and right to rule—most people are perfectly aware everything is not fine. The question, as always, is what is to be done.
As far back as 2019, polls showed 58% of Canadians had a positive view of socialism, and 18% had a very positive view. A 2021 poll found that 35% of Canadians oppose capitalism. Expect those numbers to increase in the years to come, as capitalism continues to prove itself incapable of solving society’s most pressing problems.