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Moderator: It's a great pleasure to welcome our guest for the evening. He's a journalist and author of books including Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, and America: The Farewell Tour, among many others. He also writes on Substack at The Chris Hedges Report and is on YouTube at The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel. Please welcome Chris Hedges.
Chris Hedges: Thank you so much for joining us.
Moderator: Thanks, Kaden and Russ. Chris, we are convened tonight because you are going to be a featured speaker—I should have mentioned that in the intro—at the Worker Strike Back conference in Seattle this Saturday.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, I've been a long supporter of Shama.
Moderator: Yep, as have we. All right, well, let's get into it with a very cheerful premise. We want you to take us out of the darkness here, Chris.
Co-speaker: We want you to light the way. You got the wrong guest.
Chris Hedges: Well, it's good to have someone, you know, because I get accused of being a Doomer. And I feel like, you know, you're more of a Doomer than me. But the thing is, I'm not as smart as you. If I were as smart as you, then I could pull off being a Doomer—people would respect me more. Instead, they just think I'm a crank.
Moderator: Well, you know, it's not like I want to be a Doomer. I just don't believe in this mania of hope, this kind of optimism, because you don't see where you're going. You don't understand where you're headed. And in some ways, it's disempowering because you don't understand how bad it is.
All of my books—you mentioned some of them, but like American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, America: The Farewell Tour, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (which I did with Joseph Sacco, the cartoonist)—they're all saying, there are consequences for this decay. There are consequences for this social inequality. There are consequences for deindustrialization and the mass layoffs of 30 million workers since 1996, when they began keeping records.
And unfortunately, now, those of us—there were a few of us, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ralph Nader, who I worked for—we've been saying this for a long time. And now, unfortunately, it's come to pass. We're in really serious trouble.
Moderator: All right, I'm going to set you up to "white pill" everybody, Chris. It's going to completely play against expectations. In my lifetime, the left has never been as broken, routed, and completely defeated as they are right now—on every level: culturally, spiritually, intellectually.
I was talking about this on the show the other day. You might say, "Well, in the '50s, they were more defeated." Not really. You had a counterculture ready to come out of the shadows only a few years later. There's nothing like that visible on the horizon now.
You have talked a lot about how they created kind of an alternative culture in the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. And you've suggested that’s a way to create an alternative culture and even a government in waiting. How would the left do that, or how would society as a whole do that from where we are now? Do you think it's possible? And what would be the way forward?
Chris Hedges: It's possible, of course, but we're almost starting from scratch. Because, as you correctly pointed out, the left has been completely decimated. And this is something that Shama understands with Workers Strike Back.
The only weapon we have by which we can put pressure on the centers of power is the strike—disruptions or civil disobedience that shut down the machinery of power. I was just in London not long ago for my friend Roger Hallam, who founded Extinction Rebellion. He's serving a five-year prison sentence because they shut down the M25 motorway, which runs around London, for four days.
That’s what we have to do. But that takes organization. It also takes a vision—a political vision. And you’re right, the left got sidetracked with woke politics. And I'm all for inclusivity, but not when it's divorced from the class struggle.
Essentially, the power structure—the corporations, the Democratic Party, academia—they seized on this call for inclusivity to put women or people of color—Obama would be the perfect example—in positions to manage the empire or manage corporations. And that's the inverse of what we have to do.
I mean, having a woman CEO is not a great stride forward for feminism. It’s empowering working women. And so, this is a species of corporate colonialism.
I used to work in the Congo, for instance—I was overseas for 20 years as a foreign correspondent. You had a figure like Patrice Lumumba, the great revolutionary. Well, the CIA and French intelligence assassinated him and replaced him with Mobutu, who was also Congolese, also Black, but did the bidding of the CIA and the old colonial masters. And that’s what you have here.
You have people who are willing to—as Cornel West called Obama—the Black mascot for Wall Street, which he was. And the left got completely bamboozled by this and used. So, all of that inclusivity is great, but not when it’s divorced from the class struggle.
Co-speaker: Do you think that—sorry, go ahead.
Moderator: Do you think—I mean, since we got onto this topic—Greyzone recently did an article about how the International Republican Institute (IRI) was actually funding LGBTQ activism in Bangladesh, essentially to destabilize the government.
Looking at that, I said, "Well, wouldn't it be naive, when you look at how that kind of politics has decimated left organizing—a kind of divisive, mutated version of civil rights with a tortured postmodernism imposed on it?" Do you feel that some of that has been directed in the same way by the intelligence services to keep workers and the left divided?
Chris Hedges: Yeah, or more importantly, by corporate power. Corporate power has embraced all of this stuff—the Israeli military does, the CIA does.
They put out that ad—what was it, a few months ago?—about a "non-binary" whatever. If you’re being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, you don’t really care whether the person is non-binary or trans or whatever. If you're suffering from the aerial attacks in Gaza, it doesn’t really matter who's flying the plane.
And that's the question that wasn’t asked: What mechanisms of power are you serving? What are these mechanisms doing—whether they’re corporate, imperial, Zionist, or anything else?
And that was the great failing of the left—not to ask those questions. And they got taken for a ride.