Herbert I. Schiller

One of the unique talents of American capitalism has been its mastery of salesmanship. This should not be surprising given that marketing has been an indispensable and pervasive feature of the economy since at least the Civil War.

Still, selling a deeply flawed economic system to the people with the same enthusiasm and success devoted to advertising a bar of soap is a challenging assignment. Just as dentrifices and deodorants are extolled as matchless and wondrous, capitalism receives equally rapturous promotion, beginning in children's primers and continuing through succeeding educational and cultural channels across the social order.

One of the tricks of effective advertising is to identify the product with a highly desirable quality that has widespread appeal. A certain toothpaste, for instance, claims to offer a feeling of freshness. In selling the private ownership system to the public, this first principle of hucksterism has been applied with remarkable effectiveness.

In a nation whose origins began with an anti-colonial revolution, freedom and liberty are powerful words. Fully aware of this, generations of systemic hucksters have appropriated these words on behalf of profits and class-dominated governance. This has been the national experience up to the Second World War.

This cataclysmic event, along with its profound effects on the distribution of world power, has transformed and exponentially increased, American propaganda - salesmanship for political goals - domestically and globally. It ushered in an era of far-reaching American power-economically, politically, militarily, and culturally-which produced a giant global shift in influence from the old, worn-out European empires, to the new financial-cultural domain being created by American capital.

To make the emerging American system of domination palatable at home and acceptable abroad to nations which had struggled for centuries against colonialism, a new dimension of propaganda was a necessity.

As Nancy Snow perceptively points out in her text, two overriding objectives comprised the agenda for U.S. propaganda in the postwar period: the defense of the existing capitalist world against threatened social change-socialism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere-and, the capture of the ex-colonial period world for private enterprise and foreign capital.

Anti-communism was the instrument that served both objectives as well as the means of gaining domestic support, or at least toleration, for American global interventions and takeovers. Anti-communism turned attention away from pressing problems at home and abroad by focusing hysterically on fabricated external threats. At the same time, it enabled a continually expanding U.S. world presence to be explained as offering protection against communism.

For nearly half a century, the United States Information Agency (USIA) waged ideological war against communism in its worldwide broadcasts. Using the rhetoric of freedom and liberty-the CIA-operated stations in Europe were named Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty-American propaganda dwelled on the ominous and imminent threat of communism, while U.S. corporations moved into one global space after another.

The influence of the USIA in this period should not be over-exaggerated. Certainly, the commercial flood of U.S. cultural product that engulfed the world in the last fifty years-movies, TV programs, recordings, publications, student exchanges, theme parks, databases et al was, by far, the most important means in transmitting ideology, anti-communism and American socio-economic institutions. Yet the USIA did its bit to target those government bureaucrats, some intellectuals, local managers, etc., who may have disdained U.S. popular culture.

Once the Soviet system collapsed, however, the propaganda war took a new turn. Again, Snow is right on target as she charts the shifts in the USIA's efforts, away from anti-communism to full devotion to U.S. corporate initiatives, to extend the latter's influence in what Wall Street designated "emerging market" states, mostly former colonial territories.

Snow makes amply clear that, in this latest propaganda campaign, the use of student and academic exchange programs, and the Agency's mandate to work for mutual understanding between nations, have been perverted into crass missions to assist American companies in finding profitable business overseas.

Yet propaganda has its limits. Reality, at some point, always intrudes. As this is written, people in many Southeast Asian countries are discovering the bitter truths about the much-touted American "model" of economic development. American corporate capitalism and its far-flung network of control cannot indefinitely be made acceptable by propaganda. Despite the powerful transmitters at the disposal of capital, the harsh features of a market organized society and its inherent connection to inequality, sooner or later, will be recognized and resisted.

Nancy Snow, in this essay, makes a contribution to this end.

Herbert I. Schiller is the author of Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression; Mass Communications and American Empire; and the recently published Information Inequality.