An insistent political imperative

Socialist Register 2006: Telling the Truth (Monthly Review Press, 2005) The Socialist Register has been published annually since 1964, collecting essays by left thinkers and activists into volumes assembled around "particular topical themes." The theme of the 2006 edition is Telling the Truth, a challenging subject, but one essential for those concerned with justice to confront, and well dealt with in the 13 essays in this volume. Sociologist Frances Fox Piven and political essayist Barbra Ehrenreich collaborated on "The Truth About Welfare Reform," an examination of the dismantling of the New Deal/Great Society order by right-wing Republicans and their Democratic mimics. Despite cash assistance recipients peaking at five percent of the population (two-thirds of those being children) and accounting for only about one percent of the Federal budget, welfare "reform" is an issue of essential importance to rightists whose monster propaganda efforts transformed "welfare into a metaphor for African Americans, sexual license, and liberalism." Piven and Ehnrenreich offer a convincing explanation that the propaganda war on welfare "helped to seal [the] odd alliance" of free-marketeers and Christian extremists within the Republican party, observing that: "Market fundamentalism is… a doctrine in which the individual stands naked and unprotected before market forces and market 'law.' Christian fundamentalism also strips the individual of communal and political supports, although now the individual stands naked and unprotected before God, and God's law." The consequent increase in inequalities of income and wealth in an environment of shrinking government social supports has, by design, forced many poor people into the arms of "right"leaning evangelical churches [who] offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services," an arrangement disturbingly similar to the theocratic social safety-net provided poor Palestinians by fundamentalist Hamas. Media activist Robert McChesney's contribution is "Telling the Truth at a Moment of Truth: US News Media and the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq." "The greatest test of a press system," he writes, "is how it empowers citizens to monitor the government's war-making powers.... [C]itizen review and control is not only a litmus test for the media but for a society as a whole." The bulk of the US media soundly and consistently flunk that test. Citizens are particularly dependent on the mass media to inform us about events elsewhere in the world, and from the Spanish-American war to the present Iraq occupation, when Presidents have wished to wage war abroad while the citizenry has not, the major media have always served as the willing vessels of the lies that bend public opinion to the executive will. The critical journalistic voice is permitted only when "people in power are debating an issue," or "years after the lies were told and the lives were lost," and otherwise dismissed as being "unbalanced," "'balance' being defined not by the evidence but by accommodation to powerful interests." Other essays include "The Cynical State," "The Truth About Capitalist Democracy," "Telling the Truth About Class," "The 'Scholarly Myths' of the New Law and Order Doxa," and "Postmodernism and the Corruption of the Academic Intelligentsia." Cultural theory professor Terry Eagleton's essay "On Telling the Truth" also addresses postmodernism, charging that "those who are cavalier about the truth these days have no pressing political need for it. It is not an insistent political imperative for Stanford professors, as it might be for Malaysian sweatshop workers." The "postmodern idea that an assault on truth is somehow radical is... mistaken." he writes. "The fact is that those who run the present system are not much interested in truth at all." While reading Eagleton's closing passage, I couldn't help but be reminded of many full-time activists I have encountered who have sacrificed their time, energy, health and safety trying to make this world better: "Those who find themselves fighting for the truth–who spend their time, for example, fighting some gross deception on the part of the state–are admirable, but they are not a model of how to live, as they themselves might be the first to acknowledge. In a decent society, they would not need to campaign in this way.... Perhaps it is when we come to need the truth less urgently that we will realize that our political emancipation is complete."