Tyranny in America: Capitalism and National Decay

by Neal Wood

The US has been subjected to the ruthless and unrelenting tyranny of the world’s most advanced capitalism, permeating every aspect of American life. The chief difference from other tyrannies is its facelessness, its dependence on impersonal coercive power more than on direct violence and terror against its subjects.

A frightening irony of this new tyranny, dissected by the distinguished historian of political thought Neal Wood, is that it is producing a degenerating society and a politics headed toward collapse. All world empires have decayed from within and eventually fallen. The new tyranny’s demise may long be hidden by a sophisticated technology and international armed might.

The portents of social and political decay in the US are numerous. America is an inegalitarian class society with an ever-growing chasm separating a minuscule minority of the very rich from the poor and moderately well-off. Americans lack adequate universal medical care and their physical and mental health is declining. American society is a culture of rapidly proliferating violence, rampant consumerism, mindless entertainment, and freneticism, while its political culture, grounded in an eighteenth- century constitutionthat was never intended to create a democracyis ever more hollow and undemocratic.

Tyranny in America , written in the spirit of Tom Paine and inspired by Karl Marx, scathingly addresses the chief maladies afflicting the US and forcefully argues that fundamental change is necessary if moral, political, and social implosion is to be avoided.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 2004

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another small but potent book. The late great Neal Wood explains how the political definition of "democracy" has been warped by elite institutions of economic and political power and their managers -- at the same time as the universally accepted social problem of greed (or avarice) has been redefined as a GOOD thing.

Together, having democracy pre-defined for us as a corrupt and complex representative/parliamentary republic and having sold us that self-interest is a social virtue instead of a noisome plague has created the endless swamp of corruption, authoritarianism, and misery we think is natural in our America and the world (but is in actuality far from natural).

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first part is largely on the theoretical development of the notion of averous and the second on the bleak state of America in the early 2000s and the growth of procedural "democracy" at the expenses of any actual substantive democracy.