Communism

NATIVE INTELLIGENCE

A Column By

Jack D. Forbes

Native American Studies

University of California, Davis

COMMUNISM OF A CAPITALIST

VARIETY

Jack D. Forbes

Most of us probably associate the term "communism" with Marxism or so-called "left-wing" politics. But we live in a world where the politics of exteme "right" and "left" often come to resemble each other. In part, this is because authoritarian or totalitarian systems are controlled by a relatively small elite, whether wealthy capitalists and their dependents, or powerful military despots, or party cliques and their dependents.

What we are now seeing is the close collaboration of the so-called "communist" rulers of the People's Republic of China, who are really "state capitalists" (that is, powerful elites who control huge business enterprises in the name of the state) with eager capitalists and their political front-people from the so-called "democracies." This eager cooperation symbolizes to me the fact that we are fast reaching a new stage in the evolution of the economies and governments of much of the globe, a stage in which the differences between despotic "right-wing" regimes (such as Indonesia), despotic "left-wing" regimes (such as China) and the so-called "democracies" (such as the United States) are rapidly disappearing.

Communism implies to me an essentially one-party state in which cliques determine policy and in which the economy is dominated by huge corporate entities which have monopolistic powers either singly or collaboratively. It implies a society where "sameness" is replacing diversity in the economic sphere. When I was growing up in southern California we had Gilmore, General, Signal, PDQ, Standard, Union 76, Golden Eagle, Mohawk, Norwalk, Hancock, Shell, Pathfinder, Associated, Harbor, Texaco, Mobilgas, Wilshire, Beacon, Richfield, and many other competing oil companies. After World War II some of these had disappeared but new ones including Regal, Gulf, American, Phillips 66 and others appeared. Since the 1970's, however, the number has dwindled, due to mergers and takeovers, so that in Davis (where I now live) we have only six competing companies, all of which are huge international conglomerates. They all seem to set the same price for their products, except that Arco (Atlantic-Richfield) has a discount policy. Many neighborhoods now have only one, or at best two, competing stations.

To me this represents what I shall call "corporate or capitalist communism" since it is a system where truecompetition and free enterprise have disappeared. In the old days you or I could buy an old gas station (my dad took one over once) and we could decide what brand of products to carry unless we were restricted by a lease or contract of some kind. Anyway, when that contract was over we could switch from, say, Pathfinder to Harbor if we wanted to. We could also sell batteries, tires etc. independently of the lines peddled by the oil company. Those days are all gone, of course. Now everything is controlled by, and usually owned by, the corporation.

The giant "energy" corporations are also often controlled by the same stockholders, share powerful directors, and work closely together on all relevant matters (such as lobbying to open up the North Slope in Alaska and to take the oil away from the Native People, or, more recently, to open up an area protected for wildlife and Natives). Standard of Indiana (Amoco), Standard of Ohio (Sohio), Standard of New Jersey (Exxon and Esso/Humble), Standard of New York (Mobil), and Standard of California (Chevron) may be structured as separate corporations but I believe that that is illusory since the structure which counts is the quasi-invisible network of shared ownership and industry-wide collaboration.

In the United States we have only one major political party now, since Clinton and Gore have taken the Democratic Party completely into the old territory of Richard Nixon. The Democrats today are a "right-wing" party, actually being to the right of Nixon and far, far to the right of Eisenhower and Earl Warren. The Republicans are much the same as the Democrats except that they also possess an extreme right-wing of social pillagers and cult-followers who, together, form a crazy-quilt of sometimes opposing forces. Nonetheless, both of these associations seeking political power have opted to serve the corporations and their controlling owners. Thus economic policy and social goals are being set by a single ideology, an ideology driven by the ambitions of big-investors in globalized corporate entities.

In exchange for our political freedom (a choice about our futures) we are being offered a wide choice of drugs including alcohol, television, and entertainment. Just as in super-heated Shanghai we are bring allowed to wine and dine and waste our time in frenzied or leisurely (our choice) recreational activities. Circuses are indeed the answer, the way in which our privileged rulers, whether generals, party leaders, or CEOs, keep us pacified----unless we belong to the 20% or 30% or 40% who are being destroyed by our brave, new world of human replacement by machines.

This is what I mean by communism: commonism, the same-ism, everything being determined by the same kind of cliques of big-shots, with the rest of us left to consume one mind-silencing addictionor another. And in the meantime our rights of privacy and political expression are being invadedor thwarted wherever we live.