The following lines begin Ralph Ellison’s masterful novel, Invisible Man:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed everything and anything except me.”

Ellison’s narrator is speaking, of course, of the experience of being black in America, in the pre-Civil Rights era. But Ellison’s words here might also be those of any man today—a man of any color—who is a victim of global capitalism.

The theme of racial divide in Ellison’s novel was evoked, recently, by a New York Times article, on November 17. In many communities, the current depression “has begun to erase” that divide—if not psychologically, at least visibly. “Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office”, the article says, “and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time.” The article equally notes, though, that black Americans seem to be hit the hardest by the depression, a fact underscoring the long-lasting effects of racial apartheid in the US.

But encountering the object of one’s racism in a food-line certainly won’t erase that racism from a person’s psychology. Poor whites have hated poor blacks, and vice versa, for centuries. But what this current depression has introduced to the minds of the newly-impoverished, of all races, is the state of “invisibleness” that the poor experiences.

Keasha Taylor, 36, an official at the Division of Family and Child Services has said: “Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation [of welfare assistance]… We’re already used to poverty; they’re not.” Poverty, in one sense, is a tremendous equalizer.  To be “poor” in America is to be “invisible”, regardless of your skin color; everyone is equally non-existent. If you’re white and poor, you’re as non-existent—in the state’s eyes—as the “Other” demographics that are poor. It has always been that way, even in so-called times of “economic prosperity”. This factor of “invisibleness” is one that the growing number of newly-poor are struggling to accept.

Invisible under Capitalism

Now that middle-classes are being forced into the “invisibility of poverty”, they’re beginning to understand the state of racial “invisibility” explored by Ellison’s novel. For that is what Ellison’s black narrator and the American poor share in common—they are both invisible “sub-humans”, whose invisible “sub-humanness” fails to register on the radar of American social consciousness. They are “invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see” them—to quote the novel.

Indeed, for Americans, poverty is the 1,000-ton elephant in the room everyone ignores. Politicians, the mass media, the upper- and middle-class citizens—the poor remain invisible to all of them. To evoke the poor’s very existence is at best impolite conversation, at worst tantamount to “anti-Americanism”. God forbid, one goes further and suggests ending poverty; such a heresy results in certain expulsion from the discourse. Even Obama’s populist, campaign rhetoric fixated on assisting the “middle class”, at the expense of saying a word of substance about the systemically poor—the chronic victims of capitalism.

And even now, as the economy is all but imploding into the rubble, poverty is ignored—this while corporations scrape the cream off their “bailout” checks and hold executive resort parties.  Journalist David DeGraw, at Amped Status, has catalogued the severity of the economic and social implosion.  Here are highlights—summarized by AlterNet—of DeGraw’s “Critical Unraveling of US Society”:

1)     The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth.”

2)     The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and the poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the US population is at a record high.

3)     25 million people are unemployed or under employed. Plus, economist Nouriel Roubini, a man who accurately predicted the current crisis, has recently stated: “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the US labor markets are awful and worsening … So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest … All economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs are not coming back.”

4)     As individual bankruptcies spread like wildfire across the board, 10 US states are on the verge of bankruptcy, with several ready to declare a “financial state of emergency”.

5)     Lack of health insurance has caused 45,000 preventable deaths of US citizens in the last year (the equivalent death-toll of over ten “9/11s”), according to The American Journal of Medicine. The Journal also stated that “Nearly two out of three bankruptcies stem from medical bills, and even people with health insurance face financial disaster if they experience a serious illness.”

6)     50 percent of US children, one out of every two children need food stamps to eat. In other words, one out of every two children will starve to death without government assistance.

Journalist Alan Maass has equally noted that “About one-third of the 49 million people threatened with hunger were part of households that had what researchers call “very low food security”—meaning that one or more members of the household skipped meals, ate reduced portions or otherwise didn’t get enough to eat at some point in the year.” Maass adds that this statistic is “from 2008—before the worst job losses and unemployment hit earlier this year.”

He follows this by citing a New York Times editorial, which noted that before the depression began, “more than two-thirds of families with children who were defined as ‘food insecure’ under federal guidelines contained one or more full-time workers … This suggests that millions of Americans were trapped in low-wage jobs before the downturn that made it more difficult for them to provide children with adequate nutrition.”

Capitalism’s systemic inhumanity is not just isolated to the US, though. The same catastrophic social implosions have hit Europe and the East, as well, with the “Third World” and Latin America being slammed the hardest. The BBC’s recent worldwide poll demonstrates that “Dissatisfaction with capitalism is widespread around the globe”. The study states that “Only 11 percent of people surveyed across the 27 countries thought free market capitalism is working well, while nearly a quarter—23 percent—said the system is “fatally flawed”. A bare majority, 51 percent, believed its problems can be solved with more regulation and reform.”

The study also states that “the world’s economic system has failed to live up to its promises”. It then cites Japan’s recently-elected center-left Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who called for a global “fraternity” of livable societies.

“It is self-evident,” Hatoyama said, “that free economic activity in markets invigorates society … But it is also obvious that the idea of letting markets decide everything for the survival of the strongest, or the idea of economic rationalism at the expense of people’s lives, does not hold true anymore.”

The bottom line is that capitalism must radically change if it wishes to survive. In fact, it must change to such an extreme degree that it looks drastically different from “capitalism” of the past. If it does not do so, revolutions are going to occur globally.

The Coming Social Implosion in America

All of these facts, regarding capitalism’s innate, inhumane flaws, are lost on most Americans—even as directly they suffer from them, bizarrely enough.  This is largely because information like this, when it does break in the media, is automatically dismissed by many US citizens. Thus, this crucial information also becomes “invisible”, both to the government and the citizenry. It becomes “invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see” it.

After five decades of ideological indoctrination and institutional miseducation, a sweeping majority of Americans are left psychologically unable to accept anything which does not fit with their ideological programming. Thus, they fail to understand the causes of their grim social reality, even when faced with the naked truth.

Two recent News Junkie Post articles have addressed the current dynamics of this “brain-washed” American consciousness. Looked at together, they paint a dark picture of the coming social violence and its long-standing causes. They go far, indeed, in explaining the problem of “invisibility”.

On November, 21, “The Traumatic Illusion of Free Speech” was published. The article documents the causes and dynamics of American “brain-washing”, and the resulting ideologues which have seized control of the public discourse—leading to the closure of free speech in the US.

On November, 24, Ole Ole Olson published “Conservative Counter-revolution and the Coming Violence”. Olson’s article examines the recent historical developments, which have led to the eventuality that the brain-washed ideologues will soon irrationally explode into violence on American soil.

But as the corporate media and US politicians continually offer platitudes, while sweeping the facts of reality under the rug, the “invisible” in America are growing in number—and growing enraged at this state of affairs, even if they can’t fully comprehend the nature of those affairs. The rage, one way or another, will ignite. As Joan Didion once said of the 1960’s, “The center was not holding”.

The center is not holding today, either. Governments cannot expect to maintain such inhuman conditions for long. But what will (sadly, horrifically) separate the protests of the 60’s from coming revolts today is crucial: the 60’s movements were driven by philosophically-based, humanist ethics; today—though there will be some intellectual-minded groups—the coming revolt will be largely void of such substance.

Of the 1960’s protesters, the civil rights movement was fueled by such moral thinkers as Martin Buber and St. Augustine; the second-wave feminist movement was driven by critics like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan; the anti-war movement was influenced by a wide range of philosophers, from Karl Marx to Mahatma Gandhi.

But if the French suburban riots of autumn 2005 are any indication of where protest is today, then America is in grave trouble. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek notes in his book, “Violence”:

“the 2005 revolt [in France] was just an outburst with no pretense to [philosophical] vision … There were no particular demands made by the protesters in the Paris suburbs. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated resentment … In a weird self-referential short circuit, they were protesting against the very reaction to their protests. “Populist reason” here encounters its irrational limit: what we have is a zero-level protest, a violent protest act which demands nothing.”

Given the lack of education and psychological stability in the US, the coming American revolt will likely be more “irrational”, even more at the “zero-level” of violence, which “demands nothing” of substance, than the French riots were. The “populist reason”, here, is fueled by nothing but fifty years of irrational consumer psychology, by infantile fantasies of wish-fulfillments. No logic, no moral philosophy, no humanist idealism will be trumpeted—just violent demands to be “recognized“. Such events could easily turn the US into a genuine police state.     

Nevertheless, soon the “invisible” will explode into “visible” revolt. Then, no one will be able to ignore the giant bulge of facts, which had been swept under the ideological rug.  Americans, indeed, are in for a turbulent coming decade. Brace yourself now. The facts will explode. History, itself, is moving again.

Stephen Dufrechou is a college professor in Memphis, TN. He is a regular contributor to News Junkie Post.

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