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'The Language of Capitalism Isn't Just Annoying, It's Dangerous' (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, tweeted out part of GM CEO Mary Barra's statement. "The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future," she said. Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra's statement: "Language was pronounced dead at the scene." Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled "disruptions" of late capitalism? Published this month by Haymarket Books, Leary's Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies' impact on people and the planet).
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.
Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".
Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."
For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers, if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:
When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.
"Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.
When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.
Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.
Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.
Those countries (like most of Europe) run what is called a social democracy. Basically it's a democracy on a capitalist framework that respects property rights and such, but where the state assumes the duty of providing a basic level of care for everyone, and where they acknowledge (and act on) the need for government to regulate the market to some degree, either to address market failure, or to correct what they think are unacceptable inequalities.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The laws of supply and demand don't apply anymore. Can you actually buy what you want? What you want can probably not even be built because some corporation holds a patent hostage
I disagree - the laws of supply and demand still apply. You can buy whatever you want, but due to lack of demand, what you want may be really expensive - If you really want it, you can buy the patents, maybe buy some politicians, and pay to have what you want produced.
so you have to instead buy their inferior, spyware riddled crap
Demand isn't about what you (or I) individually want to buy, it's about what the market as a whole wants to buy. You may not want to by spyware riddled crap, but spyware riddled crap sells well because most people (the market) don't care about the spyware and most people find that the lower price (as enabled by the presence of the spyware) is preferable to paying a higher price for a product without the spyware. If enough people want to purchase and are willing to pay for systems without spyware, systems without spyware will be produced.
Or did some soda corporation decide that it's not in their interest to offer the flavor you want and they bully the local cornerstore into not offering any competing sodas if they want to get the discount they need to stay competitive?
Perhaps the soda flavors that are available are the flavors that the majority of people want to buy? Granted soda manufacturers advertise to generate demand and sway consumer opinion, but if enough people wanted a particular flavor, those people could pay to advertise as well.
I agree that it sucks to be in the minority on the demand side, because it means that I can't buy what I would like to at a reasonable price, but that doesn't mean that supply and demand is dead, it means that it is alive and well.
Social Democracy is Capitalism.
[*facepalm*]
so-cial de-moc-ra-cy
noun
a socialist system of government achieved by democratic means.
cap-i-tal-ism
noun
an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.