The New Activism: An Uprising of the Soul

Sam Smith of the <i>Progressive Review</i> has written a powerful new book on the corporate state and how the public has been lulled into a false sense of powerlessness by a culture coopted by corporate interests.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


We have been writing this column for a couple of years now (Focus on the Corporation has appeared on the MoJo Wire since September 1999). Periodically, we’ll get a message from a reader that goes something like this:

“I’ve been reading your column for a while, but it’s all negative. You lay out the problems — problem after problem, week after week — but give no hint at a solution. It’s all so depressing.”

We and others can advocate more democracy until we turn blue in the face, but at some point, we must look carefully at the question of why, given the facts on the ground, there is no mass human revolt against the corporate control over our democracy.

We set out recently in search of solutions. And luckily for us, our first stop was the Washington, D.C. office of the Sam Smith. Smith is the editor of Progressive Review, and is a longtime small-d democrat.

Smith has written a new book, tentatively titled “Why Bother? Reasons for Doing and Being.” He’s searching for a publisher.

Smith says that during a meeting on a new journalistic enterprise in the 1980s, he realized that to a large degree, facts didn’t matter anymore. “I noticed that truth was no longer setting people free,” he writes, “it was only making them drowsy.”

We were in an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, where everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself.

So, Roderick argued, we watched Michael Jordan to remember what a life filled with physical exertion was about. Similarly, Smith says, we now watch C-SPAN, to remember what democracy was about.

As we were glued to the television set and computer screen, a culture of impunity took hold.

How does a culture of impunity differ from ordinary political corruption?

Ordinary political corruption represents the corruption of the culture. A culture of impunity becomes the culture.

“Such a culture does not announce itself,” writes Smith. “It creeps up, day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism. The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate, and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed.”

Smith reminds us that the Italians, who invented the term ‘fascism,’ also called it estato corporativo — the corporatist state.

“Orwell rightly described fascism as being an extension of capitalism,” Smith writes. “It is an economy in which the government serves the interests of the oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have the powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizen.”

Is there any doubt that ours is a corporate state?

And it is our increased consciousness of the corporate state that has led us to deeper despair.

“To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment, the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and zero tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us,” Smith writes. “We do not know how to look honestly at the wreckage without an overwhelming sense of surrender.”

In the face of this despair, Smith rejects the way of the reformer in the hope that a new activism will arise — the citizen who will seek the “hat trick of integrity, passion, and rebellion.”

“We need no more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public interest activists playing technocratic chess with government bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no more talking heads,” he writes.

Instead, we need an uprising of the soul, that spirit of which Aldous Huxley described as “irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before.”

Smith wants to see Huxley’s uprising of the soul. He’s asking us to begin to fundamentally question the corporate culture that has, step by step, unannounced, engulfed us — junk food pushers in the schools, tort deformers educating judges, oil companies cleaning up in public museums, big companies of all stripes taking over public interest groups — the list is endless.

The uprising of the soul will replace the reformer with the rebel, the negotiator with the defender of justice, the prevaricator with the honest citizen, the diplomat with the radical.

“We need to think the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable, the ideal is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion replaces choice,” Smith writes. “We need to lift our eyes from the bottom lines to the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent to the hazy horizon.”

Why bother? Smith asks.

We have no other choice.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of “Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate