The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part Seven: The 21st Century
William Brown
An important case in point is the United States' relations with China. From every quarter, we hear that the bringing of "economic democracy" to China will necessarily entail the bringing of "political democracy" to the world's biggest police state. Ironically, the precedent for this intended development is not the United States (where "economic democracy" has in fact not yielded "political democracy," but has substantially eroded it), but the former Soviet Union, which was reputedly defeated as much by Western commodities as by Western ideologies and military expenditures. But, as the Soviets knew better than anyone else (certainly better than its ultimate conquerors), China is not your average "Communist" country. It has a thriving -- indeed, the world's only thriving -- economy, and thus seems quite capable of indefinitely forestalling the widespread dissatisfaction with the impoverished quality of life that eventually led to the various anti-Communist "velvet revolutions" in Eastern Europe. And yet America's business and political leaders act as if the ruthless and total suppression of the rebellion in Tianamen Square was not the untrammeled success that it has obviously been.
Media magnate Rupert Murdoch has recently entered into a $10 million deal with The People's Daily, a publication of the Chinese Communist Party, that would set up large-scale electronic publishing, digital mapping and on-line database operations on the mainland. Murdoch, mind you, is the one who has, in the words of the CEO of Tele-Communications Inc., singlehandedly "established the norm for the worldwide, vertically integrated strategy." This most recent deal was built upon the grand economic successes Murdoch and the Chinese have shared since 1993, when the Chinese constitution was amended in favor of the permanent establishment of something called a "socialist market economy," thereby insuring that Deng Xiaoping's "liberalization" policies ("To get rich is glorious") would outlive him. But in 1994, when Murdoch's telecommunications satellite carried a BBC transmission about Mao Tse-tung that displeased Beijing, Murdoch was forced not only to strike the offending story and to cut all BBC transmissions out of China, but also to remove all BBC transmissions from his satellite's entire East Asia footprint. To quote Murdoch: "They say it's a cowardly way, but we said that in order to get in there and get accepted, we'll cut the BBC out." In other words, profits are far more dear than any political ideology, unless that political ideology happens to be that of the biggest group of citizen-consumers in the world. Consequently, even in such "politically democratic" countries as Japan, viewers have thenceforth been limited to the programming (on Murdoch's satellite, at the very least) that is acceptable to Beijing. This is far from an isolated example, of course. The Chinese Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications has made it clear that any and all Internet providers that are active "in" China -- a provider "active in China" might have its headquarters anywhere in the world, possibly even in Oklahoma City -- must restrict access to any "undesirable" political discussions, and that the China Internet Corporation will see to the removal of all newsgroups, file transfer protocol (ftp) sites and other on-line services that it determines are "not related to business."
Quite obviously, the flow of "democracy" here is directly opposite to what our neoliberal political and economic leaders believe it to be. The common denominator for the entire world will not be Western conceptions of "economic democracy," even if these conceptions seem to have a Buddhistic or otherwise "oriental" flavor to them; the common denominator will be Eastern conceptions of "political democracy," even if there are no political democracies in the East. If the United States-dominated world economy wants, indeed, needs to gain access to China's 1.2 billion citizen-consumers, the former will have to acclimate itself to the political climate of the latter, not the reverse. If the Chinese do not like the political "contamination" of their culture by ours, they will threaten to deny any further commercial access to their country; they already have the military and strategic power necessary to back up such threats. Do not be deceived: international capitalists such as Murdoch -- never known for their enlightened political views or support for the working classes -- will only be too happy to be thought of as cowards, just as long as they are rich and powerful cowards. In the informatic future, absolutely no one anywhere will hear what the BBC has to say about Mao Tse-tung if the Chinese do not want their own people to hear it. And vice versa: if the Chinese do not want the rest of the world finding out about the next Tianamen Square or peasant uprisings in Fujia Town, they have only to convince the world economy that it is in its interests to suppress any "information" on these subjects with which it might come into contact -- which shouldn't be too hard, given the fact that no capitalist likes "instability," no matter who they are or where it is "breaking out." Note, in this context, the disturbing fact that the average citizen-consumer in China is as likely as you or I to know anything about the (as of 18 September 1995) nine-week-old strike against the union-busting Detroit Free Press/Detroit News monopoly.
It is astonishing that American political leaders as sharp as Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot see that the Chinese are plainly preparing to fight against the proletarian classes the world over and are not about to be persuaded by any arguments in favor of "human rights"; it is mortifying that the only American political leaders who can see that this is the case -- and are positioning themselves to take full advantage of it -- are kind and gentle fascists such as ex-President Bush. In 1988, Debord predicted that "a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the coopted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination"; that soon certain world leaders would "clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are [now] capable." Former CIA Director and ex-ambassador to China George Bush may be one of the first. In any event, it is quite clear that international fascism (or integrated "national socialism," if you will) is the spectacle's destiny. There will be no 21st century: it will be the 20th century that will begin again in 1997, when Hong Kong is returned to the Chinese. It will be then that the next and final "Cold War" will begin. Neither demonizing nor apologizing for the Chinese Communists will help, for both approaches -- as we saw during the first Cold War -- merely strengthen the world spectacle and weaken everyday life the world over.
We remember that the defeat of spectacular power "calls for commitment to practical struggle alongside the spectacle's irreconcilable enemies, as well as a readiness to withhold commitment where those enemies are not active" (Debord). The difficulty of the current historical situation is two-fold: within the G-7 core industrial nations, the spectacle's real enemies have been so thoroughly deprived of coherent theoretical critique that they were dispersed and replaced in the 1980s by enemies of the spectacle's own choosing (so that the forces of spectacular surveillance would continue to have groups "committed" to creating "instability" and thus have a reason to exist and grow); in the "underdeveloped" -- that is, former "Third World" -- countries, the spectacle's irreconcilable enemies are quite active, but they have not yet abandoned rejections of the global spectacle based upon nationalism and other illogical premises. Quite clearly, the best solution to these problems would be a reciprocal, international one.
Negation within the "developing" nations must theorize the totality of its own activity, much in the same way that groups in Europe and North America tried to do in the 1950s and '60s. Let's look at Bangalore, which is considered one of the most favorable cities in India for foreign companies "taking advantage of India's [recent] economic reforms" (as the newspapers would say). The various autonomist and nationalist groups in Bangalore agree that foreign companies should not be allowed to "participate" in areas in which India's economy -- thanks to ruthless 19th and early 20th century British imperialism -- is able to provide for itself. "India does not need foreign investment in junk food manufacturing," says a leader of the farmers' group that is reputed to be the leader of the protests; India is apparently quite willing to and capable of producing its own junk food and other nourishingly spectacular commodities. But the various protesting groups are even less rigorous when they come to ventures involving high technology, which appear unlikely to them to succede without massive foreign investments. (Bangalore is already a major center for franchises of US-dominated computer software and aerospace companies.) The protesters do not seem to realize that genuinely autonomous high-technology enterprises based in India will not succede, even if foreign companies do invest heavily! For "investment" is a misleading description of a process in which foreign companies simultaneously appear to support and actually secure effective control over local industries by allowing them to use -- but not compete with -- the patents, copyrights and trademarks owned exclusively by the foreign companies. (Note in this context the functional similarities between the "green revolution" of the 1940s and the "information revolution" of our own decade.) For India to be truly autonomous, it must not only reject all junk and other neo-foods (without regard for which country invested in and produced it) in favor of real food, but must also develop competitive "intellectual technological properties" on, for and of its own.
Negation within the G-7 core nations must certainly follow the example of revolutionary groups in Bangalore. In the last two years, admirable attacks have been carried out there by an assortment of nationalist, anti-capitalist and farmers' groups on the offices and store locations of such appropriate targets as Cargill Inc., the Coca-Cola Company, McDonald's, the Kellogg Company, and the Pizza Hut and Frito-Lay units of Pepsico. (One wonders when attacks on these same companies will begin in Moscow, Prague and the former East Berlin, and will be renewed in New York, Amsterdam and Paris.) But the biggest successes of these falsely-labeled "anti-American" or "anti-Western" groups have come on the terrain of international finance: only last month, they forced the state government of Maharastra to repudiate a contract for a $2.8 billion power plant near Bombay in which the Enron Development Corporation of Houston, Texas, had already invested $300 million. Such a victory isn't simply a victory against the endo-colonialization of the world by spectacular industry; it is also a victory over the monopolization of the world economy by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which had arranged for and provided the loans that were to fund the project and thus guarantee G-7 control over it. As Noam Chomsky has recently asked,
Who [in the G-7 nations] follows the crucial decisions of the GATT negotiators or the IMF, with their enormous impact on global society? Or of the transnational companies and international banks and investment firms that dominate production, commerce, and the conditions of life worldwide?In other words, who follows the decisions of the groups by and for whom the "information revolution" is being staged? As Chomsky himself implies, only Noam Chomsky does. And that's both a big problem and a place for us to begin. Again.
[Editor's note: this text was completed on 18 September 1995. The following day, the Washington Post published Industrial Society and Its Future, the 35,000-word manifesto of the Unabomber. Consequently, part VI: Terrorism and the State will have to be up-dated. The author pledges to do so as soon as possible. NOT BORED! will publish the up-date of part VI when it is completed.]
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