‘Citizens United’
 
‘Citizens United’ is the shorthand designation for the January 2010, 5/4 Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, No. 08-205) that effectively abolished governmental limits on ‘political spending by corporations in candidate elections’. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html). It is an interesting phrase, as we reflect upon the political situation over which this latest regressive development presides.

The possibilities for systematic, systemised corruption are imminent in the very arrangement itself. I would hesitate to make statements about politicians in general—there are varying degrees to which they have been bought, and perhaps this degree is higher in the Senate than in the House—but when corruption is a possibility inherent in the system’s functioning, we can already assume it to be at work. For many politicians, the constituencies to which they are responsive and by which they are held to account—and they really work hard for these constituencies, ensuring that their interests are consistently represented—are corporate groups. Not just corporations in the more specific sense—incorporated companies— or in terms of Labour and Trade Unions and other classic organizational players, but in terms of the whole shadowy array of legal entities that we see at work in this 2010 election—funds loosely affiliated with, but totally separate from the major party machinery, such as Karl Rove’s new victory fund, funds that accept foreign investments (!), representative councils and lobbying organizations (such as the Chamber of Commerce), and, most strikingly, anonymous donor-pools—all institutionalised, all filling legally defined compartments fashioned for them by previous or incumbent law-makers. This is the current face of American politics.

All these entities are corporate in the simple sense of being able to mobilize, in principle, more capital than an ordinary individual, although, treated in the courts as individuals, they are nonetheless permitted to invest unlimited amounts of this capital in attending to the election of politicians favourably inclined to the furtherance of their interests. The legal argument is that expenditure to this end is a form of political expression and is thus protected under the ‘free speech’ provisions of the constitution. The great interpretive feat has thus been achieved of including among the inalienable rights of man the right to manipulate an election. We are of course dealing with legal forms of manipulation, and this is precisely the point: the law has provided the conditions for a open contest between the minority who have access to vast monetary resources and the majority who do not, with no limits and no safeguards.

Some extraordinarily wealthy individuals are capable of engaging in this contest alone: the influence of a small number of capitalist barons is now felt across large tracts of the political landscape. Setting aside those who are actually running for office (such as Meg Whitman in California), take four as an example : the Texan mineral tycoon sponsors of the ‘Swift Boat Veterans For Truth’ smear-campaign against John Kerry in 2004 and this year’s Proposition 23 in California, and the Koch brothers of Kansas, whose personal brands of doctrinaire right-wing libertarianism percolate through a wide network of institutes, think-tanks, and other organisations party to their financial beneficence.

The role played by private capital in elections continues to dramatically increase: the six federal election cycles of this century have, in succession, surpassed all previous spending records by ever-expanding margins. The money spent on a given campaign is a reliable indicator of its chances of victory: Obama in 2008 was no exception—hardly an attribute of the spontaneous ‘grass-roots enthusiasm’ that supposedly gave him the edge were the hundreds of millions of dollars calculatedly placed behind his electoral bid by representatives of the financial sector, the pharmaceutical sector, and the insurance sector.

Capital ultimately equates to the ability to defeat those political agendas and demands at odds with the peculiar interests of its controllers, both openly through propaganda and ‘consensus management’ and covertly through bribery and extortion. This arena of struggle, where strength is measured in dollar expenditures, is today the technical meaning of ‘democracy’ in America. Propaganda only remains a necessary component—and we have seen it in all of its colourful, hateful splendour over the last several months—because the electorate must still be called upon to facilitate and sanction the key stage in the cycle—elections—without which the system would have no legitimacy whatsoever.
In short: the very basis of effective citizenship in the US today —meaning here genuine political representation—is capital, moving in a circuit that excludes tens of millions of Americans, who thus function more or less as meta-citizens, or political ‘consumers’, addressed every two years on an increasingly frantic and irrational level.

As opposed to the political and judicial rights and capacities that under a functional constitution accrue and apply evenly to all citizens, capital is not only always unevenly distributed, but is itself the most active agent of tyranny and misdistribution. Its influence should ideally be minimised in politics; the price paid by interest groups to a corrupt minority should never outweigh the much larger real cost their interests levy on the majority. Yet precisely the opposite has been achieved in America. The unavoidable social and environmental costs of corporate enrichment, of capitalist accumulation on a scale never before witnessed in human history, are levied with impunity and without redress, they extend into the future and across the globe, impoverishing, poisoning, displacing a borderless ‘un-citizenry’ of the politically excluded and marginalized. The leading front of this plague is now in the heartland of America itself: the ongoing war—in the sense of the unaccountable, illegitimate, authoritarian extension of capitalist politics into the lives of ordinary people—that has long shaped the experiences of those living in US domains overseas, has now come home. The rage, hatred, fear, the total distrust and disdain directed at the political elite in the US is a clear sign of this smouldering crisis, this bitter political and social division that, rather than being diffused through redistributive measures, or, better yet, channelled by citizen collectives into positive movements for change, is inflamed and exacerbated by cable-news demagogues, skilled backstage political operatives, and cynical ad-men, seeking to ride its savage momentum into power and office, where they will continue to facilitate the exercise of tyranny by the ‘business community’— including the manufacturers of chemical and nuclear weapons, unmanned attack aircraft, oil platforms, armoured bulldozers and other monstrous banes to humanity—over the remainder of the globe.

This is a dangerous game that holds no chance of a positive outcome, unless of course, it is not played at all. By this I do not advocate a total withdrawal from politics, but rather a withdrawal from the way they are currently practiced in America, a refusal to accept the supposed ‘citizen’s rights’ of corporations and other private centres of capital, and a deep scepticism vis-à-vis the claims to wisdom and rectitude on the part of the political parties that have thus far defended those dubious ‘rights’ at any cost, including their own. 
           

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