By Wjard van
Leeuwen
Aren’t bankers
really running the world? Didn't the US administration exploit 9/11 for their
own purposes? Didn’t they have an interest in letting 9/11 happen, or even in
setting it up?
‘Conspiracy
theories’ (CTs) answer ‘yes’ to these types of questions, claiming that
important political, social or economic events are the products of plots by
secret groups that are largely unknown to the general public. CTs explain
history as a series of secret plots. They can ring true because bankers, for
example, really do have an inordinate amount of social, political and economic
power. And they can seem quite radical because they question the status quo.
However CTs obscure
a realistic understanding of important events. CTs do not, for example, explain
why bankers behave as they do – why does ‘greed’ or a ‘lust for power’ revolve
around money in the particular ways that it does? Because CTs obscure a real
understanding, they can offer no solutions. They therefore have the effect of
serving the system by deflecting blame and attention from where it belongs –
with the system, and the people who propagate that system. CTs sum effect is
demobilisation.
Why are conspiracy theories
prominent?
The global capitalist
crisis – the most serious systemic (rather than cyclical) crisis since the
1930s – has dramatically worsened the problems working people face under
capitalism. Jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate, accelerating the
already-quick decline in wages (as share of total GDP). For many young people a
secure job is not even on the cards. The state is increasingly militarised and
dissent is crushed in evermore ruthless ways. The capitalist political system
is beginning to lose legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people.
These are frightening facts.
People feel like hidden forces beyond their control dominate their world. This increasing
sense of alienation is leading them to search for explanations and solutions.
In the past, people could turn to
the labour movement, which embodied a critique of capitalism. The Marxist
tradition was the most highly developed form of this critique. It laid bare the
class basis of capitalism: society is essentially divided into workers, forced
to sell their labour-power in order to live, and capitalists, who pay labourers
less in wages than the value that those labourers produce (called
‘exploitation’), in order to make a profit and accumulate capital. The Marxist analysis
of both the economic foundation, and the legal and political superstructure of
capitalism, provided a framework which guided the strategy and tactics of the working
class in its political and economic struggles.
In the last thirty years of
neoliberalism however, the labour movement in the form of unions and
working-class political parties has been under sustained assault. The
ideological form of this assault was summed up Margaret Thatcher’s phrase
‘There Is No Alternative’ to capitalism. A measure of the success of this
attack – which reflects the historical balance of class forces rather than any
actual ‘truth’ – is in the relative disintegration of all alternative ideologies,
even of Keynesian capitalist ideas. This disintegration was bolstered by the
collapse of Soviet Union, which provided a living, if degenerated, alternative
to capitalism.
This relative throwback in
class-consciousness and a lack of alternatives meant that newly radicalised
people are sometimes starting their search for explanations and solutions from
scratch. They find these explanations in the many ‘new’ ideas, principles or
theories that have been invented or discovered by this or that would-be
universal reformer, including CTs.
Real conspiracies versus
conspiracy theories
Socialists do not say there are
no conspiracies per se, that the ruling class does not lie to public.
There is plenty of evidence that they do – one only needs to look at Murdoch’s
phone hacking, the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the
Watergate scandal. There is no doubt that members or sections of the ruling
class ‘conspire’ and manipulate.
However, it not so much the point
that individuals and specific groups conspire to achieve their ends, but rather
that behind those individuals are objective reasons which cause them
behave in very specific ways. Simply put, these reasons are the necessity for
capitalists to maximise profits and accumulate capital, as well as ensuring that
the necessary social, political and economic conditions for this accumulation
exist.
If one group of capitalists were
replaced by another, they would behave in a similar ways, with similar outcomes
– the maximisation of profits and accumulation. This is true for the
Rothschilds, Henry Ford, and for Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer. They might even
subscribe to differing social strategies on how to achieve this. Keynesianism and
neoliberalism, for example, both aim to ensure capitalism’s needs in differing
ways. In this sense, the problem is a systemic problem, not one of individuals
– the behaviour of capitalists is constrained by confines of capital accumulation.
In this sense Marxism is actually the best framework for analysing those
conspiracies that really do take place, because it places them within the
fundamental objective drives and contradictions of the capitalist system,
rather than seeing them as constituting the central drive of the system themselves.
Obscuring reality
The most obvious problem with CTs
is the low standards of evidence. Having placed a great of effort in showing
inconsistencies in media and government accounts of events, CTs often then simply
make up their own interpretations, often relying on ‘hidden’ factual
information. However, if criticism of the existing system is to reach and
influence a mass audience it must connect with working people’s experiences,
rather than relying hours of special research to uncover buried evidence. The
class nature of events can be exposed on the basis of publicly available
information, and will speak to the experience of the working class. It is this
generalisation of the class experience, and interpretation and interconnections
of facts that distinguish a Marxist analysis, not ‘amazing’ factual revelations.
CTs are also inherent
implausibility – not only do they control more or less everything important
that happens, but the members of the ruling groups are usually countable on
one’s fingers. How are they possibly able to make all the decisions necessary to
run a complex modern society? Even if they could, such a system would extremely
unstable and easily overthrown. Capitalist societies like the USA have in
reality been relatively stable since the Second World War.
Further, even if the ruling class
is only a tiny percentage of the population, they are still quite sizable even
in a small country like Australia. This minority rules through a state machine
which keeps the majority in check, using institutions like the army, police,
courts, government departments and so on. These hierarchies are headed by
members of the ruling class, but run on a day-to-day basis by the middle classes
and professional workers.
The conspiratorial groups are usually
presented as all ‘being in on it’. But in reality it is common interests that hold
the ruling class together, in particular their interest in exploiting the
working class. This is why businesses and governments behave as they do, being both
driven and constrained by the objective logic of capitalism – the accumulation
of capital and its social requirements. In CTs the system has no objective logic, which makes any
understanding of the system’s development dependent on uncovering the latest
plot.
Through this understanding of the
logic of capital accumulation we can see what unites the ruling class – CTs consistently
overestimate the unity of ruling class– but also what divides them: one
capitalist against another, one group against another and one capitalist state
against another. This is vital to understanding the causes of the major wars
and inter-imperialist conflicts that have shaped the last century. CTs,
including some presented in ‘Zeitgeist’, often claim that a secret group
deliberately caused crises. This of course begs the question of how it could possibly
be in the interest of the system to enter deep recessions, which wipe trillions
off share values, send production into decline and so on. Economic crises are the
result of the internal contradictions of capitalism, such as monopolisation,
falling wages leading to demand crises, and so on.
There are many more problems with
CTs. One is their use to attempt to cut across working class unity, by creating
divisions along national, ethnic or other social lines, for example
anti-Semitism in banking conspiracies, or the claim that leaders of the Russian
revolution were really aiming for Jewish world domination, for example in the hoaxed
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Another use of CTs by the ruling class is to
divert attention away from their destructive social and economic policies, witnessed
in the recent US primaries, or to protect their own sectional capitalist interests,
such as mining magnate Clive Palmer’s recent claims against the environmental
movement.
Solutions
Apart from being a confusing and
inconsistent way of understand the world, CTs also do not generate any strategy
for practical action to change the world, apart from trying to inform people of
the hidden conspiracy. In this sense CTs are disempowering and demobilising. Given
their enormous power, how could a small and secret group possibly be taken down,
while at the same time avoiding the formation of new secret groups? Other common
‘solutions’, such as those prominent in Zeitgeist, amount to withdrawing from
the world to try and build a new society, which is impossible given the
unceasing (and militarised) search by capitalism for markets and resources.
This rejection of the possibility of changing the world is, however, contradicted
by the history of the workers’ movement, which not only fought and won reforms from
capitalism, but also made revolutions that fundamentally changed societies. It
is no accident that both reforms and revolutions were often guided or
influenced by a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis of capitalism, which had over
160 years developed and tested a strategy for achieving the overthrow of
capitalism. Marx’s understanding of class struggle, Rosa Luxemburg’s conception
of general strike, Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution, and Lenin’s contributions
on the role of the revolutionary party concretely suggested what should be done
to advance the interests of working people – something CTs are incapable of
doing.
Conspiracy theories can seem
quite radical, because they are hostile to bankers or other exploiting groups, and
the status quo generally. CTs however actually obscure an understanding of the concrete
political and economic processes that shape the world, especially the processes
of capital accumulation and the creation of the necessary social conditions for
that accumulation. Consequently these ‘theories’ do not offer any solutions to
the problems faced by working people. And precisely because they do so, they
have the effect of serving the system by deflecting blame and attention from
where it actually belongs – with the system and the people who propagate that
system. Instead what is needed is a rigorous scientific approach, one which is
capable of laying bare the class nature of the processes that shape capitalist
society. This understanding can then inform the socialist practice of class
struggle to actually fundamentally change the world.
