-Caveat Lector-
The God That Sucked
Thomas Frank
Despite this, many economists still think that
electricity deregulation will work. A product is a product, they
say, and competition always works better than state control.
"I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith,"
said Philip J. Romero, dean of the business school at
the University of Oregon and one of the architects of
California's deregulation plan.
--New York Times, February 4, 2001
Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo
jumbo of the free market was in the country
club locker room or the pages of Reader's Digest. Spout
off about it anywhere else and you'd be taken
for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah's Witness.
After all, in the America of 1968, when the
great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife
or hardhat or salary-man, still had an
all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to
mention a fairly clear understanding of what social
class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology
back then had all the prestige and credibility of
hosting a Tupperware party.
But thirty-odd years of culture war have changed all that.
Mention "elites" these days and nobody
thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers.
Instead they assume that what you're mad as
hell about is the liberal media, or the pro-criminal
judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all
bureaucrats.
For the guys down at the country club all these inverted
forms of class war worked spectacularly well.
This is not to say that the right-wing culture warriors
ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or
shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock 'n' roll.
Shout though they might, they never quite got
cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far
more important: political power, a free hand to
turn back the clock on such non-glamorous issues as welfare,
taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws,
for chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that
culture war got the deregulatory job done, they
simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash variants
flowered in the burned-over districts of
conservatism: Posses Comitatus, backyard Confederacies
mounting mini-secessions, crusades against
Darwin.
For most of the duration of the thirty-year backlash,
the free-market faiths of the economists and the
bosses were kept discreetly in the background. To be sure,
market worship was always the established
church in the halls of Republican power, but in public
the chant was usually States' Rights, or Down
with Big Gummint, or Watch out for Commies, or Speak
English Goddammit. All Power to the Markets
has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.
So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to
triumph, though, that eventually they forgot this.
Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed up by a
sense of historical righteousness so cocksure
that it might have been lifted from The God That Failed,
that old book in which ex-Communists
disavowed their former convictions, the right evidently
decided in the Nineties that the time had come
to tell the world about the wonders of the market.
Dinesh D'Souza, pedagogical product of the Jesuits, these days can
be found swinging the censer for Mammon and thrilling to the
mayhem his ruthless "god of the market" visits on the undeserving
poor. George Gilder, erstwhile elder of the Christian right, is now the
Thirty-Third Degree Poobah in the Temple of Telecosm, where he
channels the libertarian commandments of his digital Juggernaut in
the language of the angels.
A host of awesome myths attest to the power of this new god.
Markets must rule, some right-wing prophets tell us, because of
"globalization," because the moral weight of the entire
world somehow demands it. Others bear tidings
of a "New Economy," a spontaneous recombination
of the DNA of social life according to which,
again, markets simply must rule. The papers fill
with rapturous talk of historical corners turned, of old
structures abandoned, of endless booms and weightless work.
The new god makes great demands on us, and its
demands must be appeased. None can be shielded
from its will. The welfare of AFDC mothers must be
entrusted unhesitatingly to its mercies. Workers
of every description must learn its discipline, must
sacrifice all to achieve flexibility, to create
shareholder value. The professional, the intellectual,
the manager must each shed their pride and own
up to their flawed, lowly natures, must acknowledge
their impotence and insensibility before its divine
logic. We put our health care system in its invisible
hands, and to all appearances it botches the job.
Yet the faith of the believers is not shaken. We
deregulate the banking industry. Deregulate the
broadcasters. Deregulate electricity. Halt antitrust.
Make plans to privatize Social Security and to
privatize the public schools.
And to those who worry about the cost of all this,
the market's disciples speak of mutual funds, of
IPOs, of online trading, of early retirement. All we
have to do is believe, take our little pile of treasure
down to the god's house on Wall Street, and the market
rewards us with riches undreamed of in human
history. It gives us a Nasdaq that is the envy of the
world and a 401(k) for each of us to call his own.
Then, one fine day, you check in at Ameritrade and find
that your tech portfolio is off 90 percent. Your
department at work has been right-sized, meaning you
spend a lot more time at the office-without
getting a raise. You have one kid in college to the tune
of $30,000 a year, another with no health
insurance because she's working as a temp. Or maybe you
lost your job because they can do it
cheaper in Alabama or Mexico. Your daughter's got a
disease that requires $400 a month in drugs, and
your COBRA insurance benefits are due to run out in two
months. Or maybe you're the Mexican
worker who just got a new maquiladora job. You have no
electricity, no running water, no school for
your children, no health care, and your wage is below
subsistence level. And should you make any
effort to change these conditions-say, by organizing a
union not aligned with the corrupt PRI-you're
likely to get blacklisted by local factory managers.
That's when it dawns on you: The market is a god
that sucks. Yes, it cashed a
few out at the tippy top, piled up the loot of the
world at their feet, delivered
shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their ten-bedroom
suburban chateaux. But
for the rest of us the very principles that make
the market the object of
D'Souza's worship, of Gilder's awestruck piety,
are the forces that conspire to
make life shitty in a million ways great and small.
The market is the reason our
housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public
transportation is lousy. It is
the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across
the map. It is the reason our
word processing programs stink and our prescription
drugs cost more than
anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few might
enjoy a kind of prosperity
unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had
to abandon ourselves to a
lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning
obedience within an ever-more arbitrary and despotic
corporate regime, to medical care available on a
maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market
interested in catering only to the fortunate. In order
for the libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the
smug sleep of the true believer, the thirty millions
among whom they live must join them in the dark.
But it is not enough to count the ways in which the
market sucks. This is a deity of spectacular
theological agility, supported by a priesthood of
millions: journalists, admen, politicians, Op-Ed writers,
think-tankers, cyberspace scrawlers, Sunday
morning talk-show libertarians, and, of course,
bosses, all
of them united in the conviction that, no matter
what, the market can't be held responsible. When
things
go wrong only we are to blame. After all, they
remind us, every step in the economic process is a
matter of choice. We choose Ford over Dodge and
Colgate Total over Colgate Ultra-Whitening; we
choose to take that temp job at Microsoft, to live
in those suburbs, to watch Channel 4 rather than
Channel 5. We participate in markets; we build markets;
markets, in fact, are us. Markets are a
straightforward expression of the popular will.
Since markets are the product of our choices, we have
essentially authorized whatever the market does to us.
This is the world that we have made, let us
rejoice and be glad in it.
Virtually any deed can be excused by this logic. The
stock market, in recent years a scene of no small
amount of deceit, misinformation, and manipulation,
can be made to seem quite benign when the high
priests roll up their sleeves. In October 1999, a
heady time for small investors, Andy Serwer of
Fortune could be heard telling the inspiring story of
an investment "revolution" in which the financial
power of "a few thousand white males" in New York was
"being seized by Everyman and
Everywoman." We the people had great, unquestionable
power: Serwer's article was even illustrated
with clenched fists. We had built this market, and it
was rewarding us accordingly.
But these days Serwer is pondering the problem of
"stock market rage" as those same Everyman
investors are turned inside out by the destruction
of $4 trillion of Nasdaq value. Now that the country is
in the sort of situation where brokers and bankers might
find themselves in deep political shit, Serwer
observes that we have become quite powerless. Investors
are "mad as hell," Serwer notes, but "there
isn't much [they] can do about it." The explanation for
this supposed impotence is, strangely, a moral
one: Choice. Since those lovable little guys acted of
their own free will when they invested in Lucent,
PMC Sierra, and Cisco, today there is no claim they can
make that deserves a hearing. What has
happened is their fault and theirs alone.
The market only fails us, it seems, when we fail
it-when our piety is somehow incomplete, when we
don't give the market enough power, when we balk at
entrusting it with our last dime. Electricity
deregulation didn't work in California, the true
believers chant, because the scheming elitist political
class of that state betrayed the people, refusing to
give them enough choice, to deregulate all the way.
Free to choose is a painfully ironic slogan for
the market order. While markets do indeed sometimes
provide a great array of consumer choices, the
clear intention of much of the chatter about technology,
"globalization," and the "New Economy" is, in fact,
to deny us any choice at all. Moving from rhetoric to
the world of financial politics the same logic
holds true: Markets show a clear preference for the
shutting down of intellectual dissent and political
choice. Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that
the vote-counting has been halted. Markets punish
the bond prices of countries where substantial left
parties still flourish. Markets reward those lands-like
Bill Clinton's USA-where left parties have been
triangulated into impotence. So predictably do markets
celebrate the suppression of political difference
that Thomas Friedman, the highly respected New York
Times columnist, has actually come up with a
term for the trade-off: "the golden straitjacket."
Since all alternatives to laissez-faire are now
historically discredited, Friedman maintains, all
countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business
stance. When they do, "your economy grows and your
politics shrink." The pseudodemocracy of
markets replaces the real democracy of democracy;
the great multinational corporations nod their
approval; and the way is clear for (some) people
to get fantastically rich.
Friedman has a point. Consider the case of Singapore,
long the inamorata of market heavies and their
press agents. As we all know by now, Singapore is an
economic miracle, a land arisen from Third
World to First in a handful of decades. Singapore is
the land with the most economic freedom in the
world. Singapore is more comprehensively wired than
anywhere else. Singapore is the best place to do
business in all the earth. And as proof you need look
no further than a postcard of Singapore's glittering
downtown, at all the spanking new skyscrapers erupting
from the earth in stern testimony to the
market's approval.
And what the market loves best about Singapore is what
is absent: Politics. Singapore's shopping
malls-heavenly landscapes of chrome and polished
granite, of flashing jumbotrons and free floor shows
for the kids-trump those of our own land. But
politically the country is a dull monotone. Here there is
little danger that opposition parties will come to
power or that crusading journalists will violate the rules
of what Singaporeans call "self-censorship."
So what replaces politics? What fills the blank space
left when a country has sacrificed dissent on the
altar of the market? In Singapore, the answer seems
to be management theory. Settling down one
Sunday afternoon in that country with a copy of the
Straits-Times, the more or less official newspaper,
I turned to the section most American newspapers
reserve for book reviews and think-pieces and
found instead: a profile of the management guru who
co-wrote the One to One series of marketing
books; a column about the urgent need to adapt to
waves of workplace "change" (you know, like
"outsourcing"); an enthusiastic story about the new
president of PepsiCo, a native of India who
reportedly studies videotapes of Michael Jordan's
greatest basketball moments in order to "catch
insights about the value of teamwork"; a profile of
the management guru who co-wrote The
Individualized Corporation ("Power to the people is
[his] motto"); a profile of one of the paper's
writers in which the concept of "the journalist as
a brand" is the point of departure; and a review of one
of those sweeping, pseudo-historical books so beloved
of business readers that start out with the
Neanderthals and end up affirming various contemporary management homilies about
creativity and entrepreneurship.
Management theory has become so variegated
in recent years that, for some, it now constitutes a
perfectly viable replacement for old-fashioned
intellectual life. There's so much to choose from! So
many deep thinkers, so many flashy popularizers,
so many schools of thought, so many bold predictions,
so many controversies!
For all this vast and sparkling intellectual
production, though, we hear surprisingly little about what it's
like to be managed. Perhaps the reason for this
is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering,
dazzling theories of management seem to come down
to the same ugly thing. This is the lesson that
Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage
jobs that she works and then describes in all
their bitter detail in her new book, Nickel and Dimed.
Pious chatter about "free agents" and
"empowered workers" may illuminate the covers of
Fast Company and Business 2.0, but what strikes
one most forcefully about the world of waitresses,
maids, and Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich
enters is the overwhelming power of management, the
intimidating array of advantages it holds in its
endless war on wages. This is a place where even
jobs like housecleaning have been Taylorized to
extract maximum output from workers ("You know, all
this was figured out with a stopwatch,"
Ehrenreich is told by a proud manager at a maid service),
where omnipresent personality and drug tests
screen out those of assertive nature, where even the
lowliest of employees are overseen by
professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip
without remorse or relent, where workers are
cautioned against "stealing time" from their employer
by thinking about anything other than their
immediate task, and where every bit of legal, moral,
psychological, and anthropological guile available
to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the
problem of pay from ever impeding the upward
curve of profitability. This is the real story of
life under markets.
But the point where all the "New Economy" glory and
promise really start to suck, where all the
vaunted choice and empowerment of free markets are
revealed as so many creaking stage devices, is
when Ehrenreich takes on the shiniest of all the
Nineties myths-productivity. With the country as close
to full employment as it has ever been in 1999 and 2000,
wages did not increase as much as standard
economic theory held they ought. Among the devout this
was cause for great rejoicing: Through a
titanic national effort we had detached productivity
from wages, handing the gains over to owners and
shareholders instead. But this was less a "choice" that
Americans consciously made than it was, as
Ehrenreich makes undeniably evident, the simple triumph
of the nation's managers, always encouraging
employees to think of themselves as stakeholders
or team members even as they unilaterally dictate
every aspect of the work experience.
The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes
should stand as an eternal shrine to the god that
sucked: Slum housing that is only affordable
if workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids
eating packages of hot-dog buns for their meals;
women in their twenties so enfeebled by this regimen
that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners
that the maid service demands they carry about on
their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality
tests, corporate pep rallies. Were we not so
determined to worship the market and its boogie-boarding
billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might
even view their desperate, spent employees as
philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their
well-being so that the comfortable might live even
more comfortably. "They neglect their own children
so that the children of others will be cared for,"
she writes; "they live in substandard housing so that
other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure
privation so that inflation will be low and stock
prices high."
These are the fruits of thirty years of culture war.
Hell-bent to get government off our backs, you
installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to
suck the joy out of life. Cuckoo to get God back in the
schools, you enshrined a god of unappeasable malice.
Raging against the snobs, you enthroned a rum
bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits,
and hang-em-high moralists. Ain't irony grand.
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