There was an interview with someone from Sun Microsystems on the syndicated radio
program, "Newsweek on Air," Sunday morning. Although I was taking a shower at the time
and not listening with full attention, the comments this person made frightened me
deeply. The interview concerned the recent "Denial of Service" Internet attack. The
person from Sun Microsystems commented that one of the reasons such an attack was
possible was the low cost or no-cost of e-mail communication. The Sun Microsystems
person suggested that if the e-mail cost were increased, by charging customers in a
way similar to how cell phone calls are billed, with people paying for both receiving
and sending messages, then the conditions that permit a "denial of service" attack
would be eliminated.
At the moment this comment was made, I was paralyzed with fear. There is no doubt that
those who control the economic and political levers of power have noticed the success
NGOs and other protest groups are having using e-mail to mobilize their adherents, and
the healthy global civic culture that has been developing. These elites are also aware
of how destabilizing a healthy civic culture can be for a plutocratic, patronizing,
narrow-based, corporate power structure. I began to wonder how long it will be before
communication such as through listserv lists is restricted by increasing its economic
cost. Right now we can send and receive an unlimited number of messages of any length
at either a low fixed monthly cost or no cost. That is what permits the NGOs and
listserv lists to proliferate and expand. If the Internet is envisioned by the
political and economic elites as solely a commercial medium, like television, then
there is little reason for them to allow us to continue eng!
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aging in non-commercial conversations at no cost.
We have two political traditions in the United States. The first is republicanism that
was created in New England and that involved participation in public affairs among
most adults, subsistence yeoman farmers, and merchant capitalists. The second
tradition is a narrow-based aristocracy created in the South, which controls the best
land and most of the other economic resources, distributes economic benefits through
patronage, and discourages mass public education in order to preserve a compliant
lower income population. Both traditions continue to this day in the United States.
Cynthia M. Duncan's book, "Worlds Apart", gives an excellent analysis of how this
plutocratic power structure from the early days of coal mining and plantation
agriculture, coal operators and plantation bossmen maintained tight control over
workers—not just in the workplace but in every dimension of social and political life.
The danger, today, is that with the bifurcation of economic wealth into two
social-classes, both political and economic power will be absorbed by the upper twenty
percent of wealth holders, and the model by which this can be achieved is the history
of power distribution in the American South.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian socialist in the 1930s who died in one of Mussolini's
prisons, identified two distinct forms of political control: domination, which
referred to direct physical coercion by police and armed forces, and hegemony which
referred to both ideological control and more crucially, consent. For Gramsci,
hegemony is shared ideas or beliefs which serve to justify the interests of dominant
groups. The unique achievement of the southern Bourbon class was that they were able
to dominate the economic life of the South without having to resort to physical
coercion or oppression. By reducing the opportunities for the development of a healthy
civic culture, economic elites can control the conditions that perpetuate their own
hegemony.
Hugh McGuire
