The Empire Doesn’t Need You Stupid: Chris Hedges and the Limits of Knowing Better

I. Selling Relief, Keeping Command

The rich man enters the ring with an offer. Shawn Michaels has lost his retirement savings. His children need an education. Another injury could finish his career. The wealthy bully knows all this, and he’s willing to help: Michaels can come work for him. The crowd understands the humiliation before the offer’s finished. They want Michaels to knock the bastard down. In the opening scene of Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion, professional wrestling stages a confrontation familiar to anyone who’s needed a paycheck badly enough to swallow an insult. The costumes are extravagant. The bargaining position couldn’t be more ordinary. Plenty of workers have met this man. He usually leaves the cowboy hat at home.

Hedges recognizes what gives the performance its force. “The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for a high-energy pantomime,” he writes (p. 5). The spectacle doesn’t have to invent the fear of losing a home, disappointing your children, or growing too old to keep selling your body’s remaining strength. It finds those injuries waiting outside the arena and brings them inside as entertainment. The company can then collect revenue from a performance that invites the audience to despise a corporate tyrant. Even the fantasy of putting the boss on his ass can become another profitable line of business.

None of this requires the audience to believe the match is real. Hedges acknowledges that “We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality” (p. 6). A worker can recognize the script, enjoy the confrontation, and report the next morning to a supervisor whose authority needs no theatrical assistance. Enjoying fiction, believing a political claim, and possessing the power to change your circumstances are different matters. The ticket purchase doesn’t tell us which politics the spectator holds. What it establishes is that a recognizable experience of powerlessness has found a paying audience.

Dallas Smythe’s Dependency Road directs attention to another transaction taking place around the entertainment. Commercial media assemble audiences whose attention advertisers seek to purchase, with income, age, location, and other characteristics entering their valuation (pp. 22–23, 27). Watching television isn’t identical to working a paid shift, but the viewer’s leisure still enters an organized commercial relationship. Advertisers don’t need every spectator to swallow every message. They purchase access to groups they consider worth reaching. Someone who laughs at the program’s absurdity can remain commercially valuable. Knowing the joke doesn’t cancel the invoice.

Hedges gets closer to the underlying deprivation when he writes that personal style, expressed through consumption, “has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality” (p. 33). People want dignity, companionship, pleasure, and some authority over their lives. There’s nothing foolish about those desires. The profitable opening appears when meaningful control remains scarce while purchasable expressions of individuality multiply. You can choose the clothes that announce who you are, but you’ve little say over the conditions under which you earn the money to buy them. The market welcomes your personality. Your claim to govern the workplace receives a colder reception.

Sut Jhally’s The Codes of Advertising helps explain why this compensation can matter to people. Goods carry symbolic meanings that answer genuine human needs, but those meanings develop within relations of power (p. 6). A coat can offer dignity as well as warmth. Music can carry friendship, grief, and memory. Criticism becomes useless when it sneers at these attachments, as though working people should survive on bread and instruction while intellectuals reserve culture for themselves. The question concerns who organizes access to a fuller life and who profits from the frustrations surrounding it. Capital sells recognition while retaining authority over the conditions that make recognition so desperately sought.

The bargain grows more intimate in reality television. Hedges describes a world in which being watched promises confirmation that your life counts. He argues that such programming helps normalize intrusions into privacy useful to corporations and governments (p. 40). That broader effect requires evidence beyond the popularity of a show. The commercial arrangement itself is visible: personal experience becomes raw material that producers select, edit, and sell. A participant may gain an audience while losing control over the account that audience receives. Being seen doesn’t mean deciding how you’ll appear. The camera can deliver celebrity without surrendering ownership of the story.

And behind the image, someone works. Hedges’s discussion of pornography becomes most revealing when it follows money, physical demands, and the consequences performers carry away from the set. One woman describes being promised $1,000 for her first film and receiving $600 after the scene was finished (p. 59). She also recounts illness and increasingly painful work. The promised glamour comes with a wage dispute. Her body supplies the performance, but the people arranging and distributing it possess powers she doesn’t. The finished product needn’t disclose the difference between what she was offered, what she endured, and what she was paid.

A study by Corita Grudzen and colleagues, published in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Urban Health, approaches these conditions as occupational questions. Interviews with 28 performers and two industry informants trace pathways into physical, mental, and social health risks, including differences between men’s and women’s experiences. The small, nonrepresentative sample identifies mechanisms rather than measuring their prevalence throughout the industry. That’s useful precisely because it brings the analysis toward how harm develops: through working conditions and relationships that can be investigated, contested, and changed. A performer’s suffering shouldn’t become another spectacle, this time arranged for the critic’s moral satisfaction.

Hedges reproduces an NPR interview in which former performer and clinician Sharon Mitchell describes workers being treated as commodities and editable body parts (p. 79). Her account connects pressure on performers with producers’ calculations about costs and what will sell. Here exploitation acquires its practical meaning. The employer wants the performance while avoiding expenses that might protect the person producing it. The worker needs income and faces pressure to accept the terms. When illness or injury arrives, the saleable image and the living body go their separate ways. The company retains a product; the performer still has to live in the body that made it.

Heather Berg’s later research follows the contractual organization of that separation. Her 2021 analysis of pornography and independent-contractor classification examines arrangements that combine substantial producer control with avoidance of obligations associated with employment. One agreement asserts the performer’s contractor status while granting extensive rights over the resulting material. Independence becomes a peculiar privilege: the worker carries responsibilities while someone else retains command. Berg also finds that employee classification alone can’t answer performers’ demands for autonomy. They need protection and the ability to refuse direction. A different designation on the paperwork won’t automatically resolve who controls the work or benefits from its continuing circulation.

Race and gender enter these relations through the commodity itself. Hedges identifies racist categories and sexual stereotypes in the films and marketing he examines (p. 76). Blackness, Asian identity, and Latina identity become commercially prescribed roles, drawing on histories of domination that precede the camera. The worker’s appearance is made to carry meanings organized around somebody else’s presumed entitlement. Class analysis loses its grip if it treats these distinctions as decoration. Labor is bought and represented through an unequal world, and the terms imposed on workers aren’t interchangeable. But neither can the person be reduced to the stereotype through which the product is marketed. That would let the producer’s image finish the critic’s thinking.

Hedges risks that reduction when his indictment expands into images of death and annihilation. The cruelty he documents deserves an explanation precise enough to preserve the worker as a living subject. In her 2022 conversation with Helen Hester, Berg describes performers sharing information, exploiting openings in contracts, and using studio appearances to develop direct relationships with customers. Producers respond by tightening agreements. This later account, drawn from the same wider research project as her contract analysis, reveals a continuing struggle over control. Workers study the conditions imposed on them and devise ways to gain room within them. Their ingenuity doesn’t abolish exploitation. It makes the conflict visible.

That conflict disappears when exploitation is mistaken for the complete destruction of a person’s capacity to understand or act. A worker can know exactly how an agreement favors the producer and still need the money. They can recognize a danger and lack the practical means to refuse it. The question then concerns what would make refusal possible: a secure livelihood, collective backing, enforceable protections, and greater control over the product of their labor. Telling someone they’ve been degraded won’t provide any of those things. Respect begins with taking their knowledge seriously enough to investigate what prevents them from acting on it.

The wrestling spectator, the aspiring celebrity, and the performer occupy different positions in these arrangements. One buys a temporary release; another offers private experience for recognition; another sells labor under terms that shape payment, safety, and future use. What connects them is the capacity of capital to turn unmet needs into commercial opportunities without yielding control over their satisfaction. It can sell relief from insecurity while leaving insecurity intact. It can stage rebellion while retaining the receipts. It can solicit the worker’s initiative and then claim ownership of what that initiative produces.

This is where Hedges’s reporting opens onto a problem larger than deception. Seeing through a relationship doesn’t transfer the power to alter it. The audience may recognize the employer’s threat before he finishes speaking. The performer may understand the contract better than the critic reading it. Between that understanding and effective control stand property, dependence, and institutions capable of enforcing another person’s decisions. Maintaining those arrangements also takes intelligence. Someone drafts the agreements, manages the revenues, and finds persuasive language for the result. The spectacle has its educated administrators, and their competence deserves a closer look.

II. The Educated Hands of Empire

“Competent systems managers.” Hedges supplies the phrase near the beginning of his chapter on higher education (p. 89), and it complicates his indictment of institutions that supposedly don’t teach people to think. These universities produce graduates who can calculate returns, draft legislation, organize research, and administer decisions that become other people’s conditions of life. Their competence has a purpose. Before declaring the education a failure, we should examine the work it prepares them to perform. A corporation that finds reliable administrators among the graduating class might consider the university an excellent investment. The people living with their decisions might have another assessment.

Hedges understands the reproduction of privilege behind the ceremony. “The real purpose of these richly endowed schools is to perpetuate their own,” he writes (p. 98). Expensive preparation, family connections, admission, and prestigious employment form a sequence through which inherited advantages acquire the appearance of earned authority. Once admitted, students learn what counts as an important problem, whose judgment carries weight, and which ambitions lead toward a respectable career. The institution receives social privilege and returns it wearing academic robes. At graduation, the family fortune modestly declines to appear on the diploma. Apparently, the young genius accomplished everything alone.

Later research gives this process a measurable form. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman’s study of highly selective colleges finds that children from the richest one percent were twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus institution as middle-class children with comparable test scores. Alumni preferences, nonacademic ratings favoring affluent private-school applicants, and athletic recruitment contributed to the admissions advantage. Using variation among waitlisted applicants, the researchers also found that attendance increased access to elite graduate schools and prestigious firms compared with attendance at a highly selective public flagship. The study identifies a particular institutional channel: advantages help secure entry, and entry helps open further doors.

Hedges doesn’t mistake access to those doors for superior intelligence. Remembering the plumbers, postal clerks, and mill workers in his family, he insists that his educational opportunities hadn’t made him “better or more intelligent” (p. 101). That recognition gives his criticism a firmer footing. The knowledge needed to repair equipment, stretch a household budget, or recognize a supervisor’s maneuver doesn’t cease to be intelligence because nobody’s issued a certificate for it. What differs is the authority attached to the person speaking. A consultant’s judgment can become a recommendation. A worker’s judgment about the same conditions can be filed as an attitude problem.

The reach of these institutions extends well beyond the domestic distribution of prestige. WI’s examination of communication research’s imperial formation established how universities, foundations, and security agencies organized intellectual work around the requirements of domination. Research needed salaries, facilities, institutional backing, and opportunities for advancement. Those controlling these resources could help determine which questions became professional specialties and which struggled to find support. The arrangement didn’t require every scholar to receive a secret instruction. A funded career could make certain investigations practical while leaving others to whoever could afford to pursue them without one.

Christopher Simpson’s introduction to Universities and Empire follows this organization of knowledge through national-security priorities, Project Troy at MIT, and the development of its Center for International Studies. Academic prestige, government and foundation funding, assertions of scientific authority, and the exclusion of dissent helped consolidate the arrangement (pp. xx–xxii). Knowledge of other societies acquired value for institutions seeking to influence their direction. Empire needed people who could interpret political movements, assess economic conditions, and understand how resistance developed. Ignorance could spoil the operation. A trained intelligence could make it more effective.

Herbert Schiller’s Communication and Cultural Domination carries the analysis into the societies subjected to that power. Corporate expansion brings managerial training and professional standards along with investment. Local dominant classes help establish institutions suited to those requirements. Scientific work can become dependent in a similar way: research priorities set in the imperial centers attract funding and recognition, drawing skilled people away or assigning them supporting roles in projects directed elsewhere. A society may possess scientists without controlling the purposes their labor serves. Its problems furnish material for investigation while the authority to decide which problems matter remains abroad.

For workers and peasants, the difference concerns whether knowledge enlarges their command over life. Agricultural expertise can strengthen cultivators’ capacity to feed their communities, or help an enterprise subordinate their production to its commercial requirements. Knowledge of popular organization can assist a liberation movement or expose it to those seeking its defeat. We have to follow the employment, ownership, and political authority through which expertise becomes effective. The researcher’s personal decency can’t settle the question. Institutions can put a sincere desire to understand the world to work managing somebody else’s subordination.

Hedges brings this problem inside the university when he describes professors becoming itinerant workers, moving between campuses without adequate pay, secure employment, or office space (p. 110). Intellectual independence has material requirements. An instructor carrying an exhausting teaching load has little time left for an investigation nobody’s funding. Someone awaiting contract renewal has reason to consider how a public controversy might affect it. No censor needs to stand at the classroom door. Insecurity can narrow the work long before anyone issues a prohibition. “Follow the evidence wherever it leads” sounds different when your next paycheck depends on where you stop.

The university consequently contains unequal capacities to determine what gets studied and taught. An administrator courting donors, a professor directing a well-funded institute, and an adjunct rushing to another campus don’t possess the same freedom. Treating them as one comfortable intellectual caste would obscure the employment relations Hedges exposes. His argument gains force when it asks who controls appointments, resources, and the working day. Courage matters within those relations, but it won’t abolish them. The landlord’s unlikely to accept moral autonomy in place of the rent.

Yet Hedges shifts the explanation when he declares: “The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities” (p. 103). His own account has already shown institutions selecting, financing, and rewarding expertise suited to corporate power. The narrowing of education develops through that arrangement. Making the decline of the humanities its decisive cause puts the curriculum in charge of a process governed by much larger interests. Restoring literature and philosophy would still leave us asking who controls the institution, who sets its priorities, and what its graduates are employed to do.

Workers have every reason to demand access to history, literature, and philosophy. A life organized entirely around becoming useful to an employer is a miserable restriction of human possibility. But familiarity with tragedy doesn’t transfer authority over a research program or a board of trustees. Immediately before his larger claim, Hedges describes students failing to connect Conrad with the occupation of Iraq. They’d encountered the literature; the political reckoning hadn’t followed. An institution can accommodate eloquent criticism of conquest while maintaining relationships that help administer it. Empire can survive a seminar. Losing control over the institution’s resources would be a more serious inconvenience.

Hedges offers a stronger starting point one page later: “Intelligence is morally neutral” (p. 104). He identifies its capacity to serve exploitation, repression, and war, or to struggle against them. This distinction directs us toward the forces organizing intellectual work. Humanistic study can deepen revolutionary understanding when people connect it to investigation and collective struggle. The same capacity for interpretation can furnish sophisticated excuses for an intolerable order. Some of the most expensive bullshit in public life comes with impeccable credentials. The problem concerns the purposes that intelligence serves and the power that makes those purposes binding.

His treatment of journalism approaches the same institutional explanation: “It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt” (p. 175). The courtier’s vanity may deserve ridicule, but vanity alone won’t explain why the position pays so well. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model identifies pressures arising from ownership, advertising, dependence on powerful sources, organized attacks on unwelcome reporting, and anticommunism. These pressures shape what reaches the newsroom, what receives resources, and which interpretations appear professionally credible. They can operate through ordinary judgments by people who consider themselves conscientious.

Official access offers a clear example. Government and corporate institutions can supply a steady stream of statements, briefings, and credentialed experts. Investigating their claims independently takes time and money, while challenging them can jeopardize a useful relationship. A movement confronting those institutions doesn’t arrive with equivalent resources or presumed authority. The inequality precedes the reporter’s individual decision. It helps organize the field within which decisions get made, and it helps explain why an institution can publish occasional exposures without abandoning its habitual deference to power.

Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect places journalism’s resources and institutions at the center of its democratic possibilities (pp. 20–21). An honest reporter needs time to investigate, access to evidence, and backing when the investigation threatens someone powerful. Independent scholarship faces related requirements. Public understanding can’t rest indefinitely on people donating exhausted evenings to work that well-financed institutions would rather leave undone. The capacity to discover and communicate truth depends partly on who can sustain the labor. That dependence becomes political when the interests controlling its support are themselves objects of investigation.

The educated hands of empire acquire their direction through this organization of livelihood, prestige, and command. Their skills aren’t imaginary, and their usefulness doesn’t arise from knowing too little. Institutions recruit those skills, specify the work, and reward its completion. Changing the direction of knowledge therefore requires power over the conditions in which it’s produced and used. Management’s ambitions, however, reach beyond the specialist’s expertise. It also needs the trust and practical cooperation through which workers accomplish what no isolated employee could manage. Having purchased their labor, the boss would like their solidarity thrown in for free.

III. The Solidarity the Company Couldn’t Own

“The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned,” Hedges writes of the corporate happiness industry (p. 117). Everything beneath those purposes can become an invitation to participate. Workers can suggest improvements, solve problems, encourage colleagues, and contribute ideas. They’re welcome to discuss how the work gets done, provided they don’t dispute what it’s for or who commands its proceeds. Management calls this empowerment. The power to set the destination remains upstairs; downstairs, everyone’s encouraged to take personal responsibility for rowing.

The invitation works because workers already possess capacities the employer needs. They know where a procedure breaks down, which colleague needs help, and how to keep production moving when the official instructions prove useless. Their cooperation makes the workplace function. Corporate participation programs seek to bring that practical intelligence under management’s direction while presenting the arrangement as a shared enterprise. But contributing to a decision isn’t the same as possessing authority over it. A worker whose suggestion saves the company money hasn’t thereby acquired a vote over layoffs, investment, or the distribution of what everyone’s produced.

Compulsory optimism helps police this boundary. Hedges identifies its cruelty in the pressure placed on suffering people to blame themselves for their circumstances (p. 119). Applied to employment, the maneuver converts a dispute over conditions into an assessment of character. The workload hasn’t become unreasonable; the employee’s become negative. Pay hasn’t fallen short of the cost of living; someone’s lost sight of the opportunity. Once the problem resides in the worker’s outlook, management can offer encouragement instead of concessions. The company gets to injure and counsel the same person, then congratulate itself on the counseling.

There’s nothing inherently submissive about finding joy during hardship or helping someone endure distress. People need both, especially when circumstances won’t change overnight. The political operation begins when that assistance becomes an obligation to accept the circumstances themselves. A worker can appreciate a colleague’s kindness and still demand a safer workload. Management’s version of positivity asks kindness to do another job: make the demand seem unnecessary, ungrateful, or disruptive. The pressure falls on the person naming the injury rather than on those with the authority to stop it.

Scientific language can give this demand borrowed authority. Hedges describes Barbara Fredrickson presenting an allegedly exact ratio of positive to negative emotions, approximately three to one, as a foundation for flourishing (p. 126). In 2013, Nicholas Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman challenged the mathematical derivation behind the critical positivity threshold. The journal subsequently withdrew the model-dependent portion of the original paper. Fredrickson accepted that the model was unsound while defending the continuing value of empirical research on positivity ratios. Hedges’s suspicion of the advertised precision was warranted. The decimal places hadn’t supplied the missing foundation.

His interview with psychologist Dacher Keltner also preserves a necessary distinction between scientific investigation and its practical uses (p. 124). Whether an emotional practice helps someone, whether a mathematical claim holds up, and whether an employer uses happiness training to suppress grievances are separate questions. A sound finding about well-being wouldn’t authorize management to silence a complaint. An unsound formula wouldn’t prove that companionship or encouragement lacks value. The central workplace question remains who controls the practice and what happens to those who refuse its demands.

Hedges approaches that question through anthropologist Laura Nader’s distinction between social harmony and “harmony ideology” (p. 129). Workers getting along can make a difficult shift bearable. An ideology that treats conflict with management as a threat to everyone’s well-being makes those relationships serve discipline. Hedges then describes industrial reforms that remove visible status distinctions, including reserved executive facilities, while organizing employees into supposedly self-managed teams (p. 130). The disappearance of a privileged parking space may improve daily relations. It doesn’t transfer the authority to close the plant. Class command can survive quite comfortably without its own toilet.

The account of Anthony Vasquez’s experience at FedEx Kinko’s shows how the conversion happens. During a company workshop, employees played games, performed skits, and enjoyed one another’s company. Vasquez recognized the pleasure, but he also recognized the claim being made upon it: “She used the happiness and was able to switch its source from human interaction to the company” (p. 137). The participants had made something together. Management presented that experience as evidence of the employer’s generosity. Their sociability became a company asset, and gratitude for one another was redirected toward the organization seeking more sales from their labor.

Vasquez’s clarity matters. He wasn’t trapped inside an illusion he couldn’t interpret. He could distinguish the workshop’s sales objective from the enjoyment employees created among themselves. That distinction opens a possibility Hedges’s darker language sometimes obscures. Cooperation doesn’t belong naturally to the boss. The same relationships that help workers meet a production target can carry complaints, circulate knowledge, and sustain refusal. Their political direction depends on whether workers can organize them around purposes of their own.

Hedges briefly records such a struggle at General Motors’ Saturn operation in Spring Hill, Tennessee, describing a rejection of the partnership model and a vote in 2004 to restore the traditional union contract (p. 135). Contemporary labor reporting reveals an earlier struggle and more specific gains. Jane Slaughter’s April 1999 report traces the defeat of the local union’s partnership leadership to organizing that had already survived a setback. A 1998 proposal to replace Saturn’s special agreement with the national UAW-GM contract had lost two to one. But the campaign helped make dissent speakable. Workers wrote letters, copied leaflets, and carried arguments through lunchrooms, lockers, and parts bins. People who’d previously defended the arrangement began questioning it.

The dispute concerned representation as well as management. Workers resented officials occupying comfortable appointed positions while defending rotating shifts for those on the floor. In February 1999, an election with 85 percent turnout displaced the incumbent caucus. The communication that mattered hadn’t arrived as a consultant’s exercise. Workers had created it themselves, through disagreements and repeated conversations. An earlier defeat became part of the education that made a later victory possible.

Saturn worker Tom Hopp’s February 2000 account records the material results. During 1999, workers secured seniority rights and voted for fixed shifts. In December, they ratified a new contract that moved substantially closer to the national agreement. It ended the withholding of 12 percent of pay under a performance-target scheme and strengthened rights concerning transfers, light-duty placement for injured workers, and absences. More elected shop-floor representatives were to be added. Hopp didn’t describe a perfect agreement or an exact restoration of the national contract. He described gains that partnership hadn’t delivered and organized pressure had won.

The distinction between encouragement and enforceable rights now becomes tangible. A fixed shift gives a family something around which to arrange its life. Pay no longer withheld against performance targets changes what management can demand before releasing money. Representation gives grievances an organized channel beyond the discretion of a sympathetic supervisor. These achievements didn’t transfer ownership of General Motors to its workforce. They changed particular relations within the workplace, creating protections workers could invoke rather than favors they had to earn. Their limits don’t erase their substance.

Nor did the gains make continued organization unnecessary. A contract records a balance of forces; workers still need the capacity to defend it. Saturn’s importance lies in the movement from shared dissatisfaction through independent communication to representation and negotiated rights. Hedges’s own example therefore reaches beyond an account of people manipulated into obedience. Workers could redirect their cooperation, challenge officials claiming to speak for them, and make collective decisions count. They didn’t have to surrender sociability to recover independence. They had to stop allowing management to determine what their sociability was for.

That struggle also sharpens the question of belonging. The company’s inclusive “we” concealed conflicting interests until workers insisted on naming them. A national “we” can perform a similar service, gathering unequal classes and differently situated peoples beneath a promise to recover what they’ve supposedly lost together. When Hedges moves from corporate domination toward the recovery of America, we therefore need to ask who belongs to the people whose power he wants restored. For the colonized, the dispossessed, and those whose labor sustained the republic without securing an equal place within it, the answer can’t begin with nostalgia.

IV. Whose America Was Lost?

“I used to live in a country called America,” Hedges writes at the opening of his final chapter (p. 141). The country he remembers paid decent wages, supported public education, provided pensions and health benefits, and maintained institutions through which ordinary people could improve their lives. These weren’t imaginary goods. A pension changes what growing old means. A union wage can give a family breathing room. Losing either can turn years of labor into a sentence of permanent insecurity. Hedges’s anger begins with that destruction, and anyone who’s watched a workplace close or a parent struggle through retirement can recognize its source.

But the country remembered through those protections wasn’t experienced in the same way by everyone living within its borders, much less beneath its international power. Hedges knows this. He names the oppression of Black and Indigenous people, Japanese Americans during the Second World War, women, immigrants, and the poor. He recalls institutional racism in Boston and imperial violence in Nicaragua and Palestine (pp. 141–142). The problem isn’t their absence from his account. It’s the place they’re assigned within it: grave imperfections qualify the history of a country whose prevailing character remains protective, decent, and worthy of restoration. What helped constitute the order appears as its failure to live up to itself.

Slavery and Indigenous dispossession can’t occupy that subordinate position in an explanation of American development. They concern how land became property, how labor was compelled, how wealth accumulated, and how the state established its jurisdiction. Racial hierarchy shaped access to citizenship, employment, housing, and protection. These relations didn’t stand outside the national economy waiting for enlightened legislators to notice them. They helped organize it. WI’s engagement with settler class formation begins from this difficulty: exploitation within the imperial center doesn’t erase the differentiated positions through which people enter its working population.

Du Bois supplies a devastating measure of the entitlement involved. In “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, he identifies whiteness with “the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” The religious flourish belongs to the claim itself: possession presents its appetite as a sacred right. Elsewhere in the book, his discussion of industry asks whose needs count when society decides how labor and wealth should be organized. An improvement reserved for favored populations leaves the exclusion of others built into its definition of progress. The national community congratulates itself on treating its members better while retaining the authority to decide who qualifies as a member.

A secure American household could therefore experience real progress without its experience providing an adequate history of the society that sustained it. We don’t need to invent a dollar-for-dollar transfer from a particular colonial mine into a particular pension check to establish the larger relation. The national economy developed through conquest, slavery, racialized labor, and imperial power; its benefits were distributed through struggles conducted within that unequal structure. The family memory may be honest. Turning it into the country’s governing history gives a partial experience the authority to speak for everyone.

The distinction becomes especially clear when protection is confused with sovereignty. Better services matter, but an Indigenous nation’s claim to land and jurisdiction can’t be satisfied merely by improving its treatment under someone else’s authority. In its Canadian study Land Back, the Yellowhead Institute distinguishes denial, limited recognition, and the reclamation of Indigenous decision-making power. Consultation can acknowledge a people while withholding the authority to refuse what happens to their territory. That comparison clarifies the political difference: being heard within a settler state’s procedures isn’t equivalent to governing oneself. A courteous hearing doesn’t settle the question of who owns the damn decision.

Black liberation likewise exceeds admission into a national story whose terms remain untouched. Reparations, collective power, and self-determination raise questions about accumulated wealth, coercive institutions, and the authority to shape a common future. They can’t be reduced to making an inherited order more welcoming. If these struggles enter the argument only as examples of people whom America once mistreated, their challenge gets domesticated before it’s heard. The issue becomes whether the country can behave better toward them, rather than whether they can transform the relations through which it governs their lives.

None of this licenses contempt for the gains workers fought to secure. Employers didn’t bestow pensions and bargaining rights because the republic possessed a generous soul. Organization, strikes, political pressure, and sacrifices forced concessions from institutions with ample reasons to resist them. Defending those achievements preserves capacities people need now. But defending a public school doesn’t require defending the historical order in which access to education was racially divided. Protecting a pension doesn’t require restoring imperial supremacy. The gains can become foundations for a wider emancipation only when their defense breaks with the exclusions that limited them.

Hedges’s own language pulls in both directions. On page 142, he longs and works for the return of the America he remembers. On page 151, he states plainly: “The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back.” The second judgment demands more than mourning the first. If the structure has produced the crisis, restoration can’t supply the answer simply because an earlier arrangement offered greater security to some of its inhabitants. We have to distinguish the social capacities worth recovering from the national hierarchy in which they were lodged.

“Imperialism and democracy are incompatible,” Hedges writes (p. 147). From the standpoint of peoples subjected to foreign command, the contradiction is direct: their right to determine their lives confronts another power’s claim to decide for them. But empire hasn’t merely arrived late to poison an innocent republic. Settler expansion already joined political rights for some to dispossession for others. Democratic participation within a bounded population could coexist with domination beyond its recognized membership. Hedges’s indictment becomes stronger when that historical relationship replaces the image of a once-democratic country gradually contaminated by foreign adventures.

The same attention to differentiated power changes how we read the state’s apparent decline. Hedges describes mechanisms of corporate and governmental control being strengthened against unrest (p. 177). Nine pages later, he describes government becoming weaker and less able to protect ordinary people while directing resources into finance (p. 186). These observations belong together, but they don’t establish a general disappearance of state capacity. They reveal different capacities moving in different directions. Provision can deteriorate while rescue operations expand. Institutions can become less responsive to a worker’s needs while remaining highly responsive to a creditor’s claims.

Writing during the same crisis, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin traced the state’s continuing role in sustaining global finance. Financial expansion had repeatedly required public intervention to contain its crises; the supposed withdrawal of the state concealed its active support for accumulation. Their account also identifies an international asymmetry: support for financial institutions in the capitalist centers could accompany the imposition of discipline on developing countries. This helps explain the bailout without mistaking public expenditure for public control. The state can mobilize extraordinary resources while leaving the purposes governing their use firmly in capitalist hands.

That’s why “there’s no money” must be heard as a political declaration rather than accepted as an innocent description of an empty purse. Scarcity is real, but priorities determine whose claims encounter it first. When institutions rescue finance while abandoning social provision, calling the whole process governmental weakness obscures the decisions being enforced. The problem isn’t that power has simply wandered off. It’s that working people confront its withdrawal in one place and its concentrated force in another. The bullshit about universal sacrifice asks them to mistake that distribution for a shared national misfortune.

WI’s analysis of technofascism develops this relationship through the convergence of financial command, digital administration, and coercive power. Applied here, it shifts attention from the disappearance of government toward its reorganization. Declining protection and expanding discipline can belong to the same class project. That doesn’t make the state frictionless or omnipotent. It identifies what must be investigated and contested: which capacities are dismantled, which are strengthened, who directs them, and whose resistance they’re organized to contain.

The alternative to restoration therefore starts with different obligations. Workers need secure livelihoods, public services, and effective power over production. Indigenous nations need land and jurisdiction; Black liberation demands repair and collective self-determination; peoples subjected to American power need freedom from its command. These demands can’t be gathered beneath a promise to make the old hierarchy benevolent again. Their convergence has to be built through a struggle against the relations that divide them. Once the lost republic ceases to serve as the destination, the question becomes unavoidable: what forms of collective power could replace it? And when historical movements have attempted that break, what categories does Hedges use to judge them?

V. The Alternatives Declared Guilty

The assembly line already supplies the explanation. A worker falls behind; the next worker struggles to compensate; exhaustion becomes pressure exerted sideways among people whose pace is set above them. Hedges describes this relationship, then announces that the peer-group approach replicates coercive techniques used in Communist China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea (p. 133). Suddenly, capitalist management requires a communist analogy to make its brutality recognizable. The employer controls production, purchases labor, and appropriates its results, but the explanatory spotlight moves elsewhere. Capital’s own workshop apparently needs a portrait of Stalin before we can understand what the boss is doing.

A comparison of techniques can illuminate a particular mechanism. Emotional attachment, peer pressure, rewards, and sanctions can operate across different institutions. But resemblance doesn’t establish a common social purpose, much less explain the historical character of entire societies. Hedges’s account of the line already identifies the relevant relationship: workers’ dependence on one another becomes a means of enforcing a pace they haven’t collectively chosen. Whether a cited account of coercion elsewhere withstands investigation remains a separate question. The analogy can’t carry the weight of a political verdict merely because the reader’s been trained to supply one.

The same difficulty returns in Hedges’s adoption of Sheldon Wolin’s “inverted totalitarianism” (p. 146). He does distinguish it from the classical form. Corporate power operates through formally democratic institutions, dispersed authority, campaign finance, and the management of public attention rather than requiring a single commanding leader. That distinction captures something important about domination that preserves electoral procedures. But Hedges then groups Nazi fascism and Soviet communism together as systems in which politics subordinated economics, contrasting them with a corporate order in which economics dominates politics. The classification leaves the decisive questions unresolved: which class rules, what property relations it maintains, and whose labor and resources its power commands.

A capitalist state directing production toward conquest and a revolutionary state expropriating capital haven’t become equivalent because both issue economic instructions. The instruction’s content matters. So do the institutions it destroys or creates, the classes it strengthens, and its relationship to peoples struggling against colonial rule. “Politics” and “economics” aren’t sealed compartments taking turns at the steering wheel. Property requires political enforcement; political projects operate through material relations. Without those determinations, the opposition between the two can classify the appearance of authority while leaving its substance untouched.

Domenico Losurdo’s critique of the category of totalitarianism exposes the historical selection involved. What happens when colonial domination, racial states, and the violence of liberal empires move to the margins while selected European regimes define the category? The resulting map can make imperial violence seem incidental to liberalism while treating coercion as the defining essence of communism. Losurdo’s challenge demands a consistent field of comparison. It doesn’t require pretending that particular acts of repression never happened. It requires examining them historically rather than allowing an inherited label to decide in advance which violence expresses a system’s nature and which merely blemishes its reputation.

Hedges’s sequence of political breakdown makes the stakes clearer. He moves from Yugoslavia and Milošević to Weimar Germany and Hitler, then to czarist collapse and Lenin’s Bolsheviks (p. 182). Crisis supplies the connecting thread. But a shared condition of breakdown doesn’t establish a shared political destination. The destruction of an old order opens a struggle among forces with different constituencies, programs, and relations to property. Fascist counterrevolution and socialist revolution can’t be explained by placing their leaders in a procession of frightening men who emerged when normal government failed.

The Bolsheviks confronted the power of landlords and capitalists and attempted to establish a different basis of social ownership and political authority. Fascism crushed working-class organization while preserving capitalist exploitation within a project of racial domination and conquest. Those differences aren’t secondary details to be added after classification. They concern what the movements fought for and what their victories made possible. When crisis becomes the explanation and “extremism” supplies the destination, revolutionary transformation enters the discussion already wearing the defendant’s uniform. The established order may be condemned, but breaking with it becomes evidence of another danger.

China receives an even shorter hearing. Discussing manufacturers leaving Mexico, Hedges invokes the “cut-rate embrace of China’s totalitarian capitalism” (p. 158). The phrase collapses a revolutionary history and a contested developmental process into the foreign investor’s immediate attraction to cheaper production. An investor’s motive can explain why that investor seeks entry. It can’t, by itself, explain the state’s purposes, the ownership of strategic resources, or the terms on which foreign capital is admitted. From WI’s standpoint, China’s socialist construction must be examined through those relations. The presence of markets doesn’t settle the class character of the project.

Samir Amin’s “China 2013” supplies the concrete investigation missing from Hedges’s phrase. Amin emphasizes agricultural land’s exclusion from ordinary private commodity ownership, the continued public ownership of basic industries and credit, and planning’s role in constructing a sovereign productive system. His own vocabulary includes “state capitalism,” but he insists that the label remains superficial without identifying the state’s project. He distinguishes a system organized to strengthen private monopolies from one seeking industrial sovereignty, an organized relationship with rural production, and control over integration into the world economy. He also identifies exploitation and competing possibilities of socialist advance or capitalist consolidation. His argument concerns a historical struggle whose outcome can’t be read off the existence of markets.

That approach permits a serious disagreement over policy, labor relations, or the direction of development. Hedges’s formulation barely permits the investigation to begin. China appears principally as a destination for mobile capital, while the capacity to govern capital’s entry and build beyond subordinate production disappears. For workers and peasants in countries long instructed to export cheap labor and raw materials, that distinction is fundamental. Their question isn’t whether development conforms to an immaculate blueprint. It’s whether they can acquire the productive and political means to escape dependence. Calling every difficult transition another version of the same domination leaves the world market’s existing hierarchy remarkably comfortable.

Michael Parenti’s “Global Rollback After Communism” brings this problem back to the protections Hedges mourns. Parenti argues that socialist competition helped constrain how aggressively capitalist rulers could attack their own working populations, while the destruction of socialist states shifted the international balance toward reaction. This doesn’t supply the entire causal history of any particular pension, wage settlement, or public service. It identifies a force that an account of purely national decline misses. A historical project classified chiefly as coercion also exerted pressure on capital. Its defeat could weaken people who’d never considered themselves its supporters. Capital understood that possibility well enough to celebrate.

The question becomes sharper when we bring the book’s concerns into the technological present. Tricontinental’s July 2026 analysis of digital sovereignty distinguishes rules governing data from the infrastructure and domestic capabilities needed to make those rules effective. Buying access to a digital service doesn’t give a country the ability to maintain, modify, or replace it. A government may declare authority over information while depending on systems whose owners set crucial terms from abroad. The practical question is who can keep the service operating, inspect its workings, train its technicians, and redirect its development when public needs conflict with a supplier’s priorities.

For a hospital, university, or public administration, those capacities determine whether digitalization builds public competence or deepens dependence. A subscription can deliver something useful while leaving the subscriber unable to reproduce the service. Sovereignty therefore requires more than changing the flag above a server room. It involves skills, institutions, production, and the authority to govern their use. Without them, the promise of connection can amount to a permanent obligation to rent the means through which society knows and administers itself. The colonial office has acquired a customer-support portal; the underlying question of command hasn’t disappeared.

In his March 2026 analysis of technological monopoly, Bappa Sinha distinguishes the maintenance of monopoly rents from development organized around production, scale, and diffusion. He presents China’s technological advance as a challenge to the former. That distinction directs attention toward what wider productive capacity can make possible for the Global South. The issue isn’t a spectator contest over which nation possesses the cleverest engineers. It’s whether technologies remain instruments of enforced dependence or become more accessible foundations for development. Particular partnerships must be judged through the capacities and control they create. National branding can’t do that analytical work.

A contrasting program makes the point brutally clear. In The Technological Republic, Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska also condemn consumer technology’s triviality and call for collective purpose. Their proposed renewal binds the software industry more closely to the state so that the United States and its allies can preserve their dominance. Military applications and technological superiority are central to the project. Here, escaping the distractions of consumer culture leads toward a stronger imperial apparatus. This isn’t Hedges’s program. It demonstrates why seriousness, national ambition, and technical competence carry no emancipatory guarantee. An empire can stop wasting talent on another app and put it to work making domination more efficient. That’s a change of purpose worth giving a damn about.

Hedges himself supplies the proposition that presses hardest against his classifications: “Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities” (p. 185). Taken seriously, that antagonism demands changes in ownership, investment, production, and the authority to determine social priorities. It requires institutions capable of confronting capital, not merely exposing its ugliness. Yet when historical attempts to construct such power arrive chiefly as examples of totalitarian danger, the argument closes routes that its own diagnosis makes necessary. The reader’s urged to reject the existing order while approaching its organized alternatives through categories inherited from that order’s ideological arsenal.

WI refuses that restriction. Socialist construction and national liberation have to be judged through their actual struggles: the property relations they transform, the capacities they build, the populations they empower, and the imperial pressures they confront. This also makes criticism more exacting. A declared revolutionary purpose can’t substitute for examining what institutions actually do. But neither can a Cold War label substitute for that examination. Once the alternatives receive their own history, the problem changes. We’re no longer confined to choosing between corporate submission and an abstract fear of collective power. We have to ask how working people acquire the knowledge, organization, and durable institutions needed to make that power their own.

VI. Hope Needs Hands, Schools, and Power

Near the end of Empire of Illusion, Hedges draws his most consequential dividing line. More than race, class, or gender, he argues, society’s separated into “radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities”: a literate minority confronting people consumed by mass culture (p. 190). The warning prepared earlier—“We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image” (p. 44)—has become a classification of human beings. Differences in education and cultural consumption now outweigh the relations through which people work, own, govern, and resist. A capacity shaped by social conditions hardens into a boundary that politics apparently can’t cross.

The book’s own evidence won’t sustain that conclusion. Its spectators can recognize a performance, its working-class relatives possess intelligence without credentials, and its educated managers understand enough to administer exploitation. Literacy matters enormously, but it doesn’t confer an emancipatory purpose on whoever possesses it. The people drafting a predatory agreement generally know how to read the damn thing. Meanwhile, someone denied schooling can understand a landlord’s power with an accuracy that escapes the economist defending it. Political education must expand people’s capacities without treating their exclusion from formal learning as proof that they’re incapable of making history.

Amílcar Cabral offers a different account of how understanding develops. In “National Liberation and Culture,” he describes an encounter that changes both leadership and the people participating in struggle. Organizers living among peasants discover knowledge, reasoning, and cultural resources that colonial society had despised. Peasants, in turn, acquire wider connections and new capacities through their participation. Leadership learns as it teaches. Literacy work, schools, health services, and responsibility for collective decisions become parts of liberation itself. Cabral’s argument emerges from an African anti-colonial struggle, but its challenge to Hedges’s supposedly unbridgeable division is direct: people transform their understanding while transforming the conditions under which they live.

Rosa Hernández Acosta’s recollection of Cuba’s literacy campaign gives that relationship a human scale. In 1961, at ten years old, she began teaching adults in her community, taking on learners when her father’s failing eyesight and her teacher’s circumstances made help necessary. Agricultural work shaped the lessons: sometimes she waited until late evening for a learner to return from the fields. The experience helped direct her toward professional teacher training. Her testimony describes more than knowledge passing from someone who possesses it to someone who doesn’t. A publicly organized campaign made an encounter possible, and participation helped produce another educator. The capacity to teach could grow through its exercise.

Nor does the image necessarily obstruct thought. Tricontinental’s 2026 account of Cuban revolutionary visual culture recalls how OSPAAAL posters circulated through publications and solidarity networks, making liberation struggles visible across borders and languages. Graphic techniques developed in advertising acquired another purpose. Their educational value depended on who produced them, where they circulated, and the discussions and organizations that gave them life. A poster can invite inquiry; a printed treatise can dignify conquest. We need to examine how a medium’s organized and used before assigning it an inherent political virtue.

Hedges nevertheless identifies something indispensable when he insists on the courage to refuse cooperation with evil (p. 112). His closing pages defend kindness and witness even when their bearers are defeated or killed. That isn’t a trivial consolation. Refusal can protect another person, interrupt obedience, or preserve a possibility that power wants extinguished. His contemporary essay “Why We Resist” makes the ethical claim explicit: action can remain worth undertaking without any guarantee of success. He’s calling people out of passivity, and the force of that demand shouldn’t be lost in criticizing its limits.

The difficulty comes when ethical endurance supplies the place where an explanation of political transformation should be. “Hope exists,” Hedges concludes. “It will always exist. It will not come through structures or institutions, nor will it come through nation-states” (p. 193). As an assertion that human kindness can survive institutional catastrophe, the passage carries real weight. As an answer to organized domination, it leaves the decisive work undone. A loving act can endure in memory after the person who performed it has been crushed. The living still need the means to prevent the next crushing.

The book already knows this. In its discussion of health care, Hedges rejects the expectation that profit-seeking insurers can be persuaded to behave like public-service institutions. He presents publicly financed universal provision as a different way of organizing access to care (pp. 155–157). The argument depends on changing the institutional relation. Compassion becomes effective through financing, trained workers, facilities, and an entitlement that doesn’t disappear when a patient loses employment. A nurse’s kindness matters. So does whether the ward has staff, supplies, and the resources to remain open tomorrow.

Care acquires durability when people can organize and defend its provision. The workplace gains examined earlier carry the same lesson: a shared commitment becomes more reliable when it changes enforceable conditions. Institutions can preserve decisions beyond the exhaustion, departure, or death of particular individuals. They can also be captured, bureaucratized, or turned against those they’re supposed to serve. That’s why their ownership, accountability, and political direction remain matters of struggle. Abandoning them to the ruling class won’t keep solidarity pure. It’ll leave solidarity doing emergency repairs on a world somebody else commands.

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara’s June 2026 proposal, “From Conference to Production,” gives political education a practical standard. Writing about South Africa, he calls for learning linked to land campaigns, cooperative production, public ownership, and struggles over municipal resources. These are proposed tasks, not a declaration that popular economic power has already been achieved. Their significance lies in the relationship they demand between study and action. People learn to investigate ownership and budgets while organizing to change them; practical difficulties send them back to study with sharper questions. Education becomes part of building the power to act on what’s understood.

A political school should therefore leave people better able to investigate their circumstances, challenge a mistaken judgment, organize with others, and hold their own leadership accountable. It shouldn’t manufacture spectators who can repeat the correct conclusions while depending forever on someone else to interpret the world. Neither should experience be romanticized as though hardship automatically teaches its own causes. Exploitation can produce insight, confusion, exhaustion, or division. Organization has to create the time, relationships, and means of inquiry through which experience becomes shared knowledge and shared knowledge becomes effective action.

This gives us a demanding way to judge Hedges’s book. Its value lies in the relations it exposes and the injuries it refuses to make respectable. It follows humiliation into the workplace and cruelty into institutions that advertise benevolence. But its culminating opposition between the literate few and the distracted many restricts the people capable of answering that indictment. Its distrust of organized alternatives then narrows the means available to them. WI takes the investigation further by asking how the global working class and peasantry, colonized peoples, and oppressed nations can become authors of the conditions under which they live.

Inside the imperial core, that obligation requires a break with the demand to recover security at someone else’s expense. Revolutionary possibility remains, but it has to be built through solidarity with struggles for land, reparations, sovereignty, and freedom from imperial command. The point isn’t to rescue an innocent America from its corrupt managers. It’s to help dismantle relations that make some people’s security depend on others’ subordination, while building institutions capable of sustaining life on different terms.

The human capacities running through this book were never manufactured by capital: the wish to belong, the pleasure of cooperation, the ability to learn, the determination to care for another person. Capital organizes their use and takes possession of their results. Recognizing that theft begins the struggle; changing who commands those capacities carries it forward. We owe one another more than a beautiful testimony over the wreckage. We owe one another the organized means to stop the bastards from producing it—and to build a world where care can survive because the people who practice it also hold power.