Intro (0:00 – 1:30):
This archival recording is part of a tribute to Michael Parenti the internationally known political scientist, historian and activist.
TUC radio time of useful consciousness. Michael Parenti. Capitalism's Apocalypse: Why the rich can't save anyone - not even themselves.
Parenti gave this talk on August 23rd 2008 in Oakland, California. He predicted the financial crisis that began only weeks later when he said that giant corporate capitalism by its very nature is an apocalyptic system when left to its own devices and unregulated. The built-in elements of ever increased growth may well bring the whole system down Parenti said and he described the growing national debt not as a tragic mistake, but as a means to shift ever more money from the taxpayers to the financial institutions. The speech that you are about to hear is an analysis of the many structural flaws of a capitalist system that puts it on a permanent collision course with democracy. Here is Michael Parenti.

First off, I think we should notice that there's a close relationship between capitalism and democracy. It's an antagonistic relationship. Historically capitalists have had a hard time dealing with democracy. They oppose in this country every democratic advance: the elimination of property qualifications for voting and for office holding they oppose it, with tooth and fang and claw and nail. They oppose the freedoms of an independent press and the strong dissident voices that emerge. They oppose mass demonstrations of dissent. They oppose the right to collective bargaining, the right to public education for all which would be a basic condition for democracy for a citizenry, they oppose that they fought against it for generations. They oppose a living wage and safe work conditions which is a democratic condition. They oppose direct elections of office holders in many cases, even to today they oppose the direct election of the president, they're sticking with the Electoral College, which of course favors these small states, giving them a very loaded additional vote and those small states usually go republican, the red states. They oppose more equitable and more democratic modes of representation. They oppose proportional representation, they've gotten a good deal of proportional representation undone in Italy getting rid of then the whole multi-party social democracy and so you've got these two left of center, right of center parties and it begins to resemble the American alignment in terms of how politics go. They oppose easy access to the ballot today as you see; Conservatives, staunch warriors of capitalism are passing laws in states like Missouri which require proof of birth. There was that case of the one woman who was 80 something, 85/86, who had been voting for, you know for half a century or more and who now suddenly had to write to Mississippi to find to get her birth certificate and there was no record of it. So she's being disfranchised by these laws. It is their goal: to disfranchise, to limit, to constrict, to undermine, to dilute democracy while keeping certain democratic forms because those forms legitimate the system and they convince people that they're free and they're self-selecting in their rulers.
 
So we should keep in mind that capitalists, historically speaking, have had a near impossible time acting, trying to act, democratic. They often cannot even abide by their own constitution. I mean it's their constitution. It's not all that democratic, it's full of all sorts of little rigs and snares and whatever else. So to defend their unfair privileges and exploitations they must act unfairly, undemocratically and unconstitutionally; using force and violence, deception and manipulation. You know Eugene Victor Debs the great American Labor leader we know Socialist. He became aware of some of this when he was thrown in jail for struggling for the rights of working people and there he was you know if you ever been roughed up and thrown in jail, you have time in jail you could feel the bruise, “oh the cop hit me here, oh he hit me here oh” and so you're sitting there and you're feeling your aches and knocks. I speak from experience, on two occasions and it really gets you thinking about the democracy that you live in you know he said “Jesus what a democracy, thank god for American democracy“. Debs thrown in jail for struggling for the rights of working people, he came to the conclusion that the state was not a neutral arbiter. That's funny, well here's a dispute between two private interests: Capital and Labor. The owners of this Factory and the people who work in the Factory. There's two private interests. Why does the state come down so heavily on the side of one particular private interest? Why does it come down on the side of Capital at such a cost to Labor and with such brutality? So Debs came to the realization as just a regular trade union leader who was trying to organize unions to get people a little more pay better pay and all that. Debs came to the conclusion that capitalism was not just an economic system, but it was a whole social order that rigged the rules in its favour and with that realization, of course, he was transforming himself from a Labor leader to a Socialist leader; while still being a Labor leader they're not mutually exclusive of course.
 
Now, while uneasy with democracy, while fearful of democracy, the capitalist class and their spokespersons and such, make a big play about claiming democracy as their invention. They claim to be its progenitors even as they subvert it, not only at home, but abroad. In the last half century, the leading capitalist states have undermined, attacked and destroyed political reform movements and revolutionary movements in countries throughout: South America, Central America Africa, the Middle East and I'm talking about the Middle East where we never think “oh there's no democracy and this phony president waged the war on Iraq to teach them democracy”. Well the Iraqis had a democratic revolution back in 1958, you know it was a wonderful thing, broad-based coalition with all sorts of groups and it was slowly undermined and destroyed through violence and assassination and everything else. The leader of the counter-revolutionary movement was a guy who was trained, equipped, advised and backed by the C.I.A; his name was Saddam Hussein. You never hear about it, whenever they talk about Saddam Hussein over the last five years they always start like he was born in 2001 or something. So they resist democratization, not only at home, but abroad.
 
The capitalist state has two core functions. The first is obviously to maintain and advance the interest of Capital accumulation, to keep that whole process going and that's the one we on the left usually focus on. There's another function which nobody seems to talk about much, that's the function of protecting the capitalist system against the Capitalists. Saving capitalism from itself, because it is a self-devouring beast. It will eat everything in sight and when there isn't anything else to eat, or sometimes there may be, but then there's this other juicy thing that it sees its own tail and it starts to devour its own tail.
 
There's a number of Latin American countries where you had near meltdowns. Brazil, remember that? I think Chile for a while, I mean the most notable one in the late 90s was Argentina where the whole thing went. That was a failure of the capitalist state to reign in the capitalists. They will go and they will plunder and they will pillage their own, if they can make a quick profit. If I could get the entire money stream that's going into this auto factory and walk away with 80 million dollars, what the hell do I want the auto factory for? What do I care about that? I'm not interested in seeing that you get cars, or refrigerators, or food, or clothing. I'm not in that business. I'm in the business of making a profit. Well, Argentina got so bad, you know what's happened since then, workers started taking over these factories and businesses and refurbishing them and building them said “who needs the bosses? What did the boss ever do? If we can just scrape together some capital in this net”. I remember talking to my friend Horacio who's an Argentinian, I said “and these bosses are coming back” they said "no they're finished they're out". Not true. They're coming back right now they're coming back claiming their property rights. Sure, they got a profitable business they want to take it all over again and milk it and plunder it for all it's worth.
 
We saw the same thing happening in the U.S. Charles Keating, he built Lincoln Savings and Loans, he built it of 200 million dollars. You see, that's what it's about. Why bother making refrigerators? You got to: get the cost, materials, deal with Labor, then you got to sell them, hope to make it back realize your investment; when you can just go and steal the money. That's it, just steal the money. He did. What did he get? Four years in prison, Charles Keating did for 200 million dollars. I know a lot of people, don't raise your hand, who would do four years if they can walk out then with 200 million dollars. I think he had to give back 30 million. They never seem to have “I don't know where I put it all, I mean here give you back something”, but the point is, if everybody's behaving that way the system, as a system, begins to collapse. So I, as the capitalist government, have to persuade you to not do that you see but if you've been doing that you might even go to jail, unless you're Vice President of the United States and President of the United States. I do think probably that the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats recognize this second function, at least more Democrats recognize it, but they have a little bit more of a sense of trying to hold off the beast from devouring itself.
 
Well, why go way back to Ken Lake? We can look right today, we may be facing a meltdown. The subprime hustling, the international bank run on the dollar. I mean it there is now, an enormous debt and you can't live on debt; eventually the whole system can collapse. Think Oh What A Wonderful Life, think of Jimmy Stewart in the bank, but instead of a little town, think of the whole world.
Besides that trade debt, we have a national debt. The national debt is the money that the government owes to the citizenry, both Americans and foreigners, and that has grown. When George W Bush took power, the national debt was five trillion dollars. It's now, as of this January, it will be 10 trillion dollars, he managed to double it. The Conservatives have discovered that the national debt is a very wonderful way of dampening spending on human services. It's also a marvellous way of undermining the Federal Government's ability to perform any functions for us and it's also a means of privatizing the federal budget.
 
The greater chunk of this budget that goes to just servicing this debt, the less money you have for anything else. So what you're doing is, every time you're paying, every tax dollar you pay, a larger and larger portion of it is simply being cut off and then put into the pockets of rich, private creditors. So the government has, for years now, been borrowing money from the people they should be taxing, meanwhile cutting the taxes of those very same people so that they'll have even more money to borrow to the government and all of this we pay for. We pay for that. That's the way the system goes.
 
Now, giant corporate capitalism is by its innate nature, its essence, an apocalyptic system. It is. When left purely to its own devices. The essence of capitalism is the transformation of living nature into commodities and commodities into dead capital; into just so many numbers in the book. So capitalism, while it's doing that, while it's transforming living nature into dead capital, is also foisting its diseconomies and toxicities upon the general public and the natural environment. I remember years ago in 1971, when I was teaching at the University of Vermont, I announced that the environmental movement is potentially subversive of capitalism and I remember a couple of colleagues saying “you're getting carried away. Where you going with that?” and that sort of thing, but I think it's true and you know by the way it's not true that the corporate class has ignored the environmental problem, quite the contrary. They have vehemently and strenuously attacked it, they've attacked the environmental movement calling them “tree huggers” and “eco Gestapo” and this and that and all sorts of names like that.
 
Getting back to Debs, sitting in his cell, Eugene Victor Debs is sitting there and he remarks that “the extent to which life in an advanced, industrial capitalist state, the extent to which it was bearable, or decent, or survivable; depended on the humanizing effects of democratic struggle”. He was saying, I would now see that the extent to which we could even bear this thing and even help it inadvertently, helping it to survive is by trying to ameliorate its worst abuses and make certain changes so that we can breathe and live and find a little space where we can be human you see. So we create little patches of community while this colossus keeps going on us.
 
So that democratic struggle is part of the class struggle. That's what those struggles are about. That's what Debs was doing, he was doing class struggle, he was doing democratic struggle. He ended up, when he got out of jail, getting thrown back into jail, by that great believer of democracy Woodrow Wilson, for opposing WWI and saying “this is a war that the working people of Europe and of America have no interest in. It's not something we should be fighting” and all that sort of thing. He went back to jail for that one. So that class struggle and democratic struggle imposes restrictions, it forces some reforms and has restraints, but that's about it. 
Well is capitalism a successful system? I mean, they've been crowing you know ever since 1991/2 with the overthrow of the Soviet Union, they've been crowing about “capitalism is a successful system, is the system that delivers the goods, it's brought us all this good life”. Is it a successful system? I would argue…yes…and no depending upon where, what is your position in the social order. You tend to see social reality according to the position you occupy in the social structure and not only tend to see, it's not just a perceptual thing, it's also an actual material reality.
 
Let's start with the capitalist leaders. Those who are both state leaders, those who are rich, I mean among the richest up there, in that top fraction of one percent. It's not the top one or two percent. It's about .04 of one percent; really owns the lion's share, most of what's going on and they're the ones who make this enormous wealth. George W Bush is one of those people and in august of 2008, which is still this month, the house speaker Nancy Pelosi came out with a statement, it's about time she actually said something confrontational and partisan, she said “George Bush is a failure in all of his policies, he's just a failure”. I disagree. I think George Bush is a smashing success in almost every area: this massive debt that he's built up you know, this massive increase in military budget, his ventures abroad which have been very war has been very good to George Bush at least for a while it was now that did backfire a little in terms of the polls and all that, the massive shift in the tax burden that's massively been shifted from that top group, the undoing of the real estate tax which they called the “death tax”, cut backs and defunding of human services including public education, environmental protections. He's been successful in all of that. He's not a total success. There's a couple of places he hasn't gotten through yet: Medicare and social security. So try, if you want to have a radical analysis and not just a liberal complaint, try to look at success the way the big money boys do.
 
Capitalism is less than fully successful in countries like: Norway, Finland, Denmark countries that you say “well they're very prosperous” and all that, but capitalism is not interested in prosperity. It's interested in profits, please don't confuse those two things. So that's where success lies. Indonesia, Nigeria, Colombia that's the model, that is the success they're looking for remember that. 
So capitalism makes a claim, not only to democracy, but also to prosperity, but that's not true as I've just been saying. The goal is private wealth for the few and public poverty for the many. To the extent that there is prosperity, it's because of as Debs thought of it in prison, it's because of our struggle to create a minimum wage law, child Labor law, social security, better wages and such but their goal is the opposite; is really to create poverty, because the poorer and hungrier you are the harder you will work for less. I mean, why is it you won't work for 18 cents an hour or 14 cents an hour the way the Indonesians do? Is it because we Americans are just so much more self-respecting we wouldn't consider it? No, it's because we're at a stage of historical struggle where we don't have to, but that goal is to get us back to 1900, because in 1900 we did. We did work for pennies an hour.
 
Half a century before the term was invented, the U.S was a third world country. It had widespread underemployment, it had tuberculosis epidemics in some of the major cities and typhoid epidemics and the like. It had all sorts of desperation, no public health, no public education well limited public education some areas only up to grade school and such. That's what they're trying to get back to. 
Now let me just say that the reactionaries in the Republican Party have enjoyed, over the last 30 years, a remarkable success. Back in 1978, and I got the quote in an essay I wrote, which appeared in one of my books, the book is out of print now Land Of Idols. It was a group of plutocrats meeting and coming at and saying “this has got to stop”, I mean giving word to Jimmy Carter who was President of the time, “this has got to stop I mean where's it going to end? You guys get this gain, that gain, this that the other thing. We're going to end up being a social democracy”. I found it fascinating that he used the term. Fast forward 30 years, there was an article recently, an article I clipped from the New Yorker, dealing with the question that the GOP is having problems, which is they're getting a shortage of issues. They don't quite know where to attack anymore and as one of them said “we've achieved our goal, which was to prevent the United States from becoming a social democracy”. He used the term again. These guys know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. This is not an analysis I'm superimposing on it, it's what they themselves think about and work on and they have, they have perfectly scripted and ideologized their approaches to things.

So that's what we have got to understand, the importance of ideology and the fact is that their goal is to get us to Indonesia. Our goal, at this historical stage at least, is to get us to Denmark and then beyond…at least.
Thank you so much for your kind attention.

Outro (26:23 – 29:00):
That was the noted scholar, activist and author Michael Parenti. This speech Capitalism's Apocalypse: Why the rich can't save anyone - not even themselves, was given only weeks before the financial crisis of 2008 began. 
Michael Parenti received his PHD in political science from Yale in 1962. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached large audiences in North America and abroad. 
You can find a huge archive of films and audio recordings of Parenti's speeches on TUC Radio's website: tucradio.org.

Parenti was recorded by Martin Spencer-Davis in an Oakland, California art gallery on August 23rd 2008.
Thank you for listening