Think Tank

In capitalist democracies, such as the United States, one of the major ideological tasks of the bourgeoisie is to get the masses to substitute their class consciousness with pseudo-consciousness (meaning a lack of awareness of one’s objective class interests) by getting them to objectify their subjective interests, and this task it has turned out has not been that difficult because of several factors structurally intrinsic to capitalist democracies. Among these is the existence of powerful conservative think tanks funded by big business and the wealthy.[3] In recent decades, these think tanks have been successful enough in convincing large sections of the working classes in espousing extremely self-oppressive propaganda advanced by the bourgeoisie. Examples of this propaganda include (not listed here in any particular order):

• tax-cuts for the rich also benefit the working classes (because of the so-called “trickle-down” economics—or more correctly “crumbs-from-the table” economics);

• the unconscionably massive economic inequality that plagues the United States is “natural” in any healthy capitalist democracy (even though this level of inequality is more a function of politics rather than economics);

• government regulations (specifically those enacted to protect the public from the negative consequences of relent-less profit maximization by big business—e.g. curbing air and water pollution) are not in the interest of the working classes and must be eliminated because they interfere with profit-maximization (euphemistically dubbed by conservatives as “job-creation”);

• climate change is not happening, or if it is, it is not man-made—therefore, the quest for alternative energy sources is not necessary;

• access to universal health-care is not a human right (except of course for members of the U.S. Congress and the rich);

• gargantuan expenditures on sustaining the military industrial complex are of greater importance than expenditures on such necessities as assisting the disabled, improving education, assisting parents in finding quality affordable day-care for their children, building and repairing roads and bridges, cleaning-up the environment, maintaining parks and wildlife sanctuaries, etc.;

• ·the American Dream is attainable by anyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules (even though in a capitalist society inequality is built in because the capitalist system cannot function without these two classes, at the very minimum: a working class and a capitalist class);

• trade-unions hurt the interests of workers and therefore membership in them should be discouraged;

• raising the minimum wage will lead to large-scale unemployment;

• businesses are always more efficient then governments (not necessarily true); so everything that can be privatized must be privatized (from fresh water supply to schools; from hospitals to bridges; from intelligence gathering to torture; and so on);

• tuition-free college education is unaffordable (in the economically wealthiest country on the planet);

• externally-directed terrorism is a greater threat to society than mindlessly-easy access to guns by even the mentally disabled (despite what statistics show);

• institutional racism no longer exists (untrue) and therefore the poverty and unemployment that disproportionately plagues the working classes who comprise people of color is self-induced;

• the widespread consumption of illicit drugs must be best dealt with through interdiction of supply (rather than dealing with the fundamental cause: social alienation that in turn fuels demand);

• immigrants are responsible for unemployment among the native-born (rather than factors such as automation, computerization, migration of manufacturing to countries where labor is much easier to exploit and regulations against environmental pollution are either non-existent or never enforced, etc.);

• federal lands (which are public lands) should be sold off to private interests;

• the social safety net is not the responsibility of government, rather it is the responsibility of civil society (e.g. charities, churches, etc.)—even though the social safety net is funded through taxes and therefore a facility that the taxpayers rightly and legitimately deserve;

• any government that professes to be an ally of U.S. corporate capital should be considered a friend worthy of unquestioning support by the United States, regardless of its human rights record or the level of corruption that it tolerates or engenders (and if there is blowback, the unstated assumption is, we will deal with it as “terrorism”).

[1]. Sometimes think tanks are also referred to as think factories. (Also note: the terms bourgeoisie, big business, and corporate capital are used interchangeably in this entry and elsewhere in this glossary.)

[2]. Examples of conservative (right-wing) think tanks with considerable influence include these (listed alphabetically): American Action Forum; American Enterprise Institute; American Foreign Policy Council; Brookings Institution; Center for International Private Enterprise; Cato Institute; Center for Immigration Studies; Center for the National Interest; Center for Strategic and International Studies; Freedom House; The Heritage Foundation; Hoover Institution; Hudson Institute; Ludwig von Mises Institute; Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; Middle East Forum; Pacific Institute; Petersen Institute for International Economics; and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (It should be noted that allied to conservative think tanks are also a number of right-wing organizations that are not considered think tanks but nevertheless have a powerful influence, especially on the U.S. Congress and the media, such as: Americans for Tax reform; Citizens United; Christian Coalition of America; Family Research Council; FOX News Channel; FreedomWorks; John Birch Society; Koch Industries, Inc.; News Corporation; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.) Are there any progressive think tanks? That is, think tanks that attempt to challenge through their work the power of corporate capital and its allies in support of the working classes. Yes, of course. But compared to big business-supported think tanks they have little influence. Examples include: Center for American Progress; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; Center for Climate and Energy Solutions; Center for Effective Government; Center for Peace and Conflict Studies; Economic Policy Institute; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; Human Rights Watch; Institute for Women’s Policy Research; International Food Policy Research Institute; New America Foundation; Open Society Institute; People for the American Way; Public Citizen; and United for a Fair Economy. What policies do they stand for? Their work, for the most part, would be in opposition to the conservative agenda outlined above.

[3]. Three other factors quickly come to mind in this often-successful effort by the bourgeoisie, in the United States, to persuade the working classes to abandon their objective interests (in favor of subjective interests). The bourgeoisie, through its monopolistic control of the corporate mass media—which includes, television, film, radio, etc.—has been able to prostitute it in the service of materialist consumerism where the message is that the sole purpose of one’s entire life is the mindless and relent acquisition of consumer goods (churned out by the capitalist system without regard to true human needs or the importance of protecting the biosphere). Another factor has been the availability of the masses as willing targets for bourgeois propaganda (to the point where they even regularly vote into power a staunchly pro-bourgeois political party). This is exemplified by the gargantuan and seemingly bottomless appetite of the lower classes for right-wing anti-working class newspapers, radio programs, television shows, films, and so on. This circumstance is an outcome of the deep ignorance (which is a precondition for development of a pseudo-consciousness) of important issues critical to the achievement of authentic democracy that is the bane of all lower classes everywhere arising from its structural location within the capitalist relations of production. That is, notwithstanding the romanticization of the supposed “revolutionary” potential of the lower classes by the Bourgeois Left, the tragically sad truth is that the very conditions that create this potential are also responsible for producing its susceptibility to pseudo-consciousness. These include, on one hand, the lack of wherewithal for self-education (time, and money), and on the other, boring, repetitive, and mindless job-related work—coupled with energy-draining overwork—that leads to lethargy and thereby a propensity toward non-intellectual soporific leisure activities. (What is even worse is that the end-result of all this is the espousal by the lower classes of an ideology of anti-intellectualism.) In sum, serious contemplation, which class-consciousness demands, is both energy and time consuming! (Instead, it’s much easier to fall into the trap of, say, “race consciousness” to explain away problems.) A third factor, is the despicable perversion of First Amendment rights (lobbying legislators and mass political advertising campaigns, by big business, is considered “freedom of speech”) after having secured from the U.S. Supreme Court—an institution that is rarely a friend of the lower classes—one of the most shamefully egregious dispensations ever known in U.S. history: the designation of corporations as “persons” and therefore, ipso facto, all the constitutional protections, including the Bill of Rights, are applicable to them too.

It should also be noted here that from the perspective of the capitalist class, its ability to employ think tanks, together with its monopolistic ownership and control of the mass media, as machinery for its ideological propaganda gives it an enormous power in its class warfare against the working classes. Consider the “three-for-the-price-of-one” benefits of this machinery: (a) it appears to the masses to be non-partisan (since their supposed purpose is to report “truth” by means of research and/or journalistic reporting), thereby allowing their propaganda to appear as “commonsense;” (b) it serves as a source of surplus (profits) in its own right as capitalist enterprises, in the case of the mass media; and (c) by using the think-tanks as conduits for tax write-offs (in addition to the tax-exempt status of the think tanks) the corporate capital ingeniously gets the public to subsidize its propaganda activities.