Jeff Bezos recently announced that the Washington Post would henceforth dedicate its op/ed pages to “free markets and personal liberties”. His Whole Foods business also asked the National Labor Relations Board to “set aside the results of a union election” that endorsed collective bargaining. The Australian social psychologist Alex Carey explained these interrelated events in the 1970s and 80s. We owe a debt to former Tasmanian Speaker Andrew Lohrey for making Carey’s explanation available after his premature death.
In his 1995 introduction to Carey’s essays titled Taking the risk out of democracy: corporate propaganda versus freedom and liberty, Noam Chomsky described Carey as “a close personal friend and a valued co-worker”. He also depicted the dedication to Carey of Manufacturing Consent (1988) as “a bare and inadequate way to try to express our indebtedness to him for his uniquely important work”.
In the essays, Carey tracked the long history of the American propaganda exercise labelled “public relations”, deployed by business to ensure the public is marshalled behind their goals, whatever the cost to that public.
Public relations began, he explained, around World War I. Employers had faced the triple challenge of muckraking journalists exposing their wrongdoing, labour organising for less miserable conditions and an expanded vote. Wartime propagandists moved on into the corporate world to serve a managerial class keen to draw on the new knowledge: Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, wrote that business “realised that the great public could now be harnessed to their cause as it had been harnessed during the war to the national cause, and the same methods could do the job”.
In the Great Steel Strike of 1919, the public initially supported the strikers who worked 84-hour weeks “under notoriously bad conditions”.
The onslaught of publicity built the “anti-Red hysteria” that made the McCarthy era possible long after it had turned the public against the strike.
During the 1920s, communications theorist Harold Lasswell warned: “If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept chains of silver.”
In 1935, the Wagner Act required collective bargaining with America’s workers. The National Association of Manufacturers was one of the primary vehicles for business propaganda fighting back. NAM’s president reported to his members: “You will note especially that this is not a hit or miss program. It is skilfully co-ordinated so as to blanket every media… and then… it pounds its message home with relentless determination.” In 1936, this was codified as the Mohawk Valley Formula; “employer mobilisation of the public… in a labour dispute.”
After World War II, the campaign escalated to destroy the New Deal and wartime conditions that constrained the industrialists. In 1950, NAM estimated its annual publications would stack to the height of the Empire State Building. “Economic education” of workers was begun in the schools and drummed in through workplaces and churches.
New businesses, such as the Opinion Research Corporation and the Psychological Corporation, were established to manage the polling and public relations that took the temperature of public opinion and manipulated it for business interests.
In spring of 1946, 81% of the public was polled as valuing the work done by the federal Office of Price Administration to stop price gouging. NAM spent $3,000,000 to “kill” it. Advertising and publications designed specifically for teachers, for clergymen, for farm leaders and women’s clubs were augmented by NAM’s speakers making a “thousand talks” before such civic organisations. By autumn of 1946, NAM inverted those figures so that a mere 26% supported the OPA.
After Congress abolished the Office later that year, consumer prices rose 15% and food 28%.
By 1961, Carey quoted historian Daniel Boorstin as mourning the impact of the advertising industry broadly on America. “We think it has meant an increase of untruthfulness. In fact,it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth.” By that stage, Carey assessed, the idea that there might be an ethical component to the deployment of public relations had been lost.
The 1960s disillusionment in America over Nixon and the war in Vietnam led to another surge in business’ efforts to control the message and convince the public that the economic sector held the key to truth.
In Australia and the UK, where business’s public relations had not taken hold as they did in the US, Carey argued that we retained a better balance between government, worker and business. Both British and Australian business leaders, “conservative” economists and politicians desired to emulate the American model that was achieving business supremacy. (Charles Kemp, George Cole and Keith Murdoch had tried in 1943 to begin this importation of the American strategy through their Institute of Public Affairs.)
Under the auspices of Mont Pelerin Society-connected economists and actors, the 1970s and 80s saw the rash of “thinktanks” founded in Australia to replicate the strategies that had remade America for “free markets”. Dominic Kelly told the tale of that era, in a book named for Bob Hawke’s assessment of the ideologues involved: “political troglodytes and economic lunatics.”
Initially the tobacco industry matched mining in donations to Australia’s “institutes” where “corporate-funded intellectuals” manufactured the messages that must be absorbed to make Australia more like America. Carey related his shock at returning from researching in the US to find the American Enterprise Institute had made the University of NSW its antipodean outpost.
Carey describes the Heritage Foundation as one of the American bodies that worked to mould the public and direct politicians for the donors’ goals. One of its founders, Ed Feulner, was brought to Australia by the Quadrant journal in 1985 to train Australia’s enthusiasts: “Proctor and Gamble does not sell Crest toothpaste by taking out one newspaper ad or running one television commercial. They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind. The institutes I have mentioned sell ideas in much the same manner.”
The disingenuous ideas they sold to allow business’s ability to manoeuvre unimpeded were about freedom: free markets, personal liberty and enterprise. Both governments and labour were to be depicted as the shackles on this freedom rather than the protectors of the average person from the might of industry. Protecting the environment that sustains us was presented as a socialist constraint on innovation.
Trump’s people have sacked two of the officials on the National Labor Relations Board that is meant to protect workers’ rights. Now the Board does not have a quorum and cannot function. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon has taken advantage of this chaos to appeal their Whole Foods workers’ right to unionise.
With Trump’s Project 2025 government, the free marketeers have their vehicle to return American conditions to the past when industrialists profited unshackled. The iron chains for workers look to be replacing the silver ones of seduction. Bezos’ agenda for the opinion pages of the Washington Post, however, suggests they don’t think it is safe to give up on the century-long effort to indoctrinate the public yet.
This essay was first published at Pearls and Irritations.
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
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Policy stands firm, proudly, as the ruling, ordering, controlling, buying and renting, domineering, plantationing classes strengthen under such as a Trump, to organise theft, appropriation, unfairness, predation, rationing, tiny flows, utter unfairness, all as SCIENTIFICALLY as the tiny mind can corner and control it all. Adolf Lives!! Seig Heil!! As one of the old, doomed, undeserving, forgettable objects, that means incremental finality, slow decline, outsiderisms, overlookery galore.., forgotten…(but I will fight, yell, observe, insult, denounce, complain, into that not so good night.)
I still have a copy of Taking The Risk Out of Democracy — a brilliant piece of work.
We are lucky that it inspired Chomsky and Herman, and probably, through them, a host of others.
On Chomsky like other faux anti-imperialist tankies, he has been dismissed by the European left since ’90s because of his genocide denial on Srebrenica some years ago.
Meanwhile running protection for Putin, repeating fossil fueled anti-Ukraine/NATO and EU talking points of Atlas-Koch eg. Heritage Foundation and Mearsheimer.
As a bona fide left German friend complained, Chomsky is neither a geopolitical nor European expert (US friend concurs, but says Chomsky is sound on the Americas 20thC), and has totally given up on his own expertise and research inc. ‘Manufacturing Consent’.
The expertise he could apply is linguistics, language, meaning, think tanks and media esp FoxNews, GB News, influencers and ‘assembly lines'(Jane Mayer), but prefers to lazily and glibly oppose US or western policies, while ‘gaslighting’ Europeans and others?
Andrew Smith is critical of Chomsky because Chomsky “prefers to glibly oppose US or Western policies.”
Andrew has outed himself with that little beauty.
Clearly, Andrew supports the most brutal imperial aggressor in world history. And in normal Andrew style provides no evidence, just accusations.
Andrew enjoys regularly disparaging what he calls “faux anti-imperialist tankies” (yes, 10 year old level name calling) to give the impression that he is opposed to imperialism.
He is not opposed to imperialism.
As a supporter of the US he supports imperialism.
Has Chomsky made mistakes?
Undoubtedly, but we cannot expect perfection from others. To do so is infantile. And when we consider the volume upon volume of Chomsky’s work for well over 50 years, his contribution is stunning.
Andrew Smith has no time for Chomsky because Chomsky has analysed the inner workings of the US imperium to great effect — how the US has attained and maintained control.
There is nothing glib about that mission.
There is nothing glib about courage.
Andrew is an imperialist.
For those who might be interested, I regard Chomsky’s “Year 501 — The Conquest Continues” as his finest work. Essential reading for those who wish to know how the world works.
Chomsky a “faux anti-imperialist tankie”… ha de ha de har… worth coming to this website for the chuckles freely offered up by the illusionists.
The opening paragraphs in the preface to the 2015 edition of Year 501 — The Conquest Continues reads as follows:
"In a penetrating (and rare) analysis of what the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist calls "the origins of European Genocide," Richard Gott predicted that "the rulers of the British Empire will be... perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale."The British historian of imperialism Bernard Porter wrote... that with evidence accumulating, the conclusion "looks... plausible."
The New York Review of Books took a rather different view. Here, it was written, that the Europeans who reached the western hemisphere "found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people whose primitive technology was hopelessly inferior to the Europeans'. In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants." This version of history dispenses with perhaps 80 million people, who had rich and complex civilizations, cities, extensive commerce and many significant technological achievements.
Denialism on a truly impressive scale.
It is, indeed, true that the victims throughout the world were "hopelessly inferior" in one crucial aspect: they lacked the European technology and culture of war, and were "appalled by the all-destructive fury of European warfare,"as observed by military historian Geoffrey Parker.
A good thing indeed that Mr Chomsky doesn’t dive into The AIMN for his daily dose of reality-based observations; after reading Andrew Smith’s take on his expertise, I’d expect he’d be choking on his weeties (in laughter!)
Thanks Lucy.
I haven’t been taught, I just had an instinctive skepticism against advertising and propaganda. It took me years, and mountains of reading to truly wake up to its breadth, depth and insidiousness.
Now, from cradle to grave, the vast majority are exposed to it continuously, both covertly and overtly. It has effect, a strangulation of ethics, and as a result has that vast majority unwittingly increasing extortion by profiteers and gougers, corruption, and limiting government and bureaucracy’s ability / inclination to properly regulate.
Yay for Carey. I’d love to acquire and read Chomsky’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy …
Clakka, the author of Taking the Risk Out of Democracy is Alex Cary. The foreword is by Chomsky. You might be in luck… try here.