The New Spirit of Capitalism

I am 270 pages into Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and hopelessly behind on the list of topics raised by the book that I’d like to write blog posts about.

The book is nothing less than an attempt to update Max Weber for neoliberalism. What is the spirit of capitalism—the ethos that provides justifications and motivations—for the individuals who live and work under capitalism’s current regime? The argument, then, like Weber’s is that economic determinism is not sufficient for an explanation of why prevailing capitalist practices change. The move from Keynesian welfare-state capitalism to neo-liberalism is not solely motivated by a response to shifting “objective” conditions: i.e. the 1970s oil shock, globalization, the new digital technologies. Boltanski and Chiapello by no means ignore those factors, but insist that “spiritual” changes in mind-set and ideas of justice and of the “good life” also play a role. Concretely, they argue that “critiques” of capitalism have an impact—and that capitalism shifts its practices to respond to and disarm those critiques. Capitalism, in other words, must align itself, at least to some extent, to the desires enunciated in critique if it expects to find willing adherents, productive and engaged workers. A capitalism that simply exploited workers outright without offering any plausible justification of its practices (in terms of claims that those practices are just and redound to the common good, and in terms of personal satisfactions that it can offer individuals within a capitalist society), they claim, would be unsustainable.

I am not utterly convinced. Sheer economic need is a powerful motivator—and when combined with powerlessness can lead people to acquiesce (however reluctantly) in a social and economic system that can also recognize as oppressive. There is every evidence that slaves in the American South hated the conditions under which their lives were lived, but failed to rebel because rebellion seemed futile. They didn’t like the life they had, but recognized no realizable alternative to it. Surely many in the world today experience their lives similarly.

But—and this is the great strength of this remarkable book—any large-scale change in social (think of changing definitions of marriage), political (think of the transition from monarchies to democracies), or economic (think of the transition from Keynesian to neo-liberal regimes) practices will be accompanied by lots and lots of words. Those words are the ideological explanations/justifications of the shift: why it is necessary, desirable, deplorable, to be resisted, to be assisted. Boltanski and Chiapello (in ways I full-heartedly endorse) want to use the term “ideology” as a completely neutral designator. An ideology is simply the discursive justification of, along with an attempt to understand, a particular social formation. Whether that ideology is true or false, plausible or risible, is a separate matter. All sides to the issue will produce their ideological account of it. They want to reserve judgment to a second stage of evaluation. At the outset, all ideologies are created equal; all are aiming for the same thing: to justify and motivate.

So, for today at least, let me just focus on one concrete example of their approach at work. Trade unions. Without a doubt, there has been an aggressive assault upon unions by the forces of neoliberalism. Equally without a doubt, the decline of unions has been an almost completely unmitigated disaster for under-skilled and under-educated workers. What B and C call the “casualization” of work—and what more recent writers have begun to call the “precariat”—has been enabled by the destruction of unions able to pose a credible threat to employers’ undermining job security.

At its most moralistic and nostalgic, leftists bemoaning this shift will locate its ideological component as the shift from collectivism to individualism. (Often, of course, this is identified as a particular sin/failing of Americans. But B & C document the same shift in France.) Union workers understood that they held their fate in common. They steadfastly refused to jettison their “solidarity.” But a new selfishness has allowed a “divide and conquer” strategy on the part of the evil capitalists to win.

Such denunciatory readings of the situation fail, however, to capture the ways in which individualism is plausible and motivating. Any teacher who has asked students to do “group work” knows the problem. I also encountered it in concrete terms when I managed a staff of seven at the university. Because my staff existed within a “step system,” the best workers could not be rewarded with a pay raise, since all employees who shared a certain job designation/description received the same pay. The inevitable result was that my best workers were constantly looking for new jobs as a means to getting a higher salary, while my mediocre workers stayed put. I could not keep good staff. It made perfect sense for those who could to seek higher paying jobs.

In other words, worker solidarity only makes sense when there is a very large group of workers who are all essentially doing the same work, with the same level of skill required. Even there, annoyance (or worse) directed at the incompetent or the lazy will arise. But in any organization where there are many different skill levels needed, where a path for advancement to a higher level job is relatively open, solidarity doesn’t only lose its appeal. It doesn’t even make much sense. I am not a worker on the factory line today and expect to be one come thirty years from today. Rather, I am in a position that I assume that I will grow out of—and do not want to be tied down to someone who is content in the position I also, for this moment, occupy.

Certainly, we can bemoan the worker’s ambition, the mindset that has her focused on how she will advance over her lifetime to better jobs than her current one. But can we really say she would be better off without that mind set? Do we really want to tie her to one job for life? With all my leftist sympathies, I couldn’t possibly advise my young, ambitious staff to do anything but continue to look for paths to advancement. I had no right to stand in their way in the name of an ideal of worker solidarity.

And it is precisely that—the feeling that there is only one obvious response, only one ethical path—when faced with a situation that defines a “spirit.” Theoretically supportive of unions, I could intellectually understand the basis of the step system under which my staff operated. But practically, on the ground, as a matter of practical reason (in precisely the Aristotelian and Kantian sense), I could only recommend behavior that undermined that system. That’s what it means to say there is a “new spirit” in town.

Unintelligible

The world no longer makes sense to me. Boltanski and Chiapello (in their superb book, The New Spirit of Capitalism [Verso, 2005]) talk about the need for intelligibility and, crucially, insist that intelligibility, which underwrites motivation, must include some standard of justice. Only such a standard makes judgment possible, thus creating ways to select between possible courses of action and different assessments of people. Justice is not the only standard. Efficiency and profit (cost/benefits analysis) are also standards employed in making decisions. But pure cynicism is very, very rare. Some notion of justice always acts as a “constraint” upon efficiency and profit. Pure greed is not a motive many are willing to embrace—and fewer are willing to publicly announce as their sole purpose. Crucially, Boltanski and Chiapello insist that the standards of justice provide real and effective brakes on capitalism’s search for profit. It is not true that anything goes. Some kind of working compromise—one that is intelligible and deemed legitimate—between justice and capitalist exigencies has to be in place.

Just what compromise exists at any given moment varies. That is the burden of their book. The think that we have, since 1990 (or so), entered a new “spirit of capitalism,” a new way of understanding (and internalizing) its justificatory bases. The justification of capitalism is both the way it publicly explains itself and the source of personal motivation for individual actors.

And here is where I run into my current trouble. In terms of the academy, the demand of “publish or perish,” and the assignment of status (among other rewards) on those who publish the most, now seems to me insane. Society is paying for us (the academics) to fill up libraries with books and journals that are mostly not read and which are incredibly redundant. The only possible justifications that I can see are: 1. You need to seed the field prodigally in order to get the 2-3% of work that represents real advancements of knowledge. Research is just inherently a very wasteful process, and we should just accept that fact—although it is one that is almost never acknowledged. And certainly this justification of the whole academic edifice is never offered in public as the primary one. 2. You need to have all that mediocre research in order that educators remain up to date with the advancement of knowledge in their fields. Since it is important for the educated (i.e. our students) to know what is the current best knowledge, their teachers have to be au currant.

I really don’t see any other convincing account of the whole research apparatus of the universities. In my field especially, picking over the carcass of Moby Dick seems particularly pointless—even while having students read Moby Dick still seems to me a very good idea. Which means we have our priorities exactly backwards, emphasizing the “research” over the teaching.

At the societal level, it seems to me that we have entered an age of cynicism that calls Boltanski and Chiapello’s view of justice as a real constraint overly optimistic. What has been so discouraging about the past year (from the election through to the efforts to repeal Obama-care and alter the tax code to favor the rich and corporations) is that appeals to justice are simply off the table. “Winning” is enough justification. We need to make America “more competitive” and we need to insure that we are economically better off and militarily stronger than every other nation. This looks like fascism because the average citizen is expected to identify with the nation’s “win” even when no benefits of that winning accrue to him. It’s sacrifice for the average Joe in order to secure the national victory.

Sure, there is some claptrap about freedom and some gestures toward meritocracy. But they are so obviously claptrap (how is getting cancer a matter of merit, of failed individual effort?; for that matter, what did the laid-off worker do to deserve her fate?) that no one, in this age of cynicism, is taken in. Rather, it is sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost. And that’s why the world no longer makes sense to me. Such naked disregard for others, such straight-forward hostility to any notions of justice or of the common good are, quite simply, incredible. Especially since people, in their face-to-face interactions, don’t act this way. Yet they vote for politicians whose cynicism and venery, whose lack of commitment to the people they are supposed to serve, are on vivid display every day.

All the polls show that people want government guaranteed health care, want the rich taxed more heavily, want the “dreamers” granted legal status, want sensible gun control. But then they vote for representatives who refuse to deliver any of those things. That makes no sense to me. I don’t understand this world anymore.

Despair

“This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.”

This is the opening paragraph of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). Let me pair it with a passage from John Berger’s Portraits, from a short piece he wrote about the Fayum portraits in 2000.

“The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive.”

I just don’t see it. Do I live in a bubble? I read about the ravages Facebook is causing for adolescents, or the booming market in plastic surgery, or the frantic search for status and wealth among various social sub-groups. And I don’t see it in the world I inhabit. Kiernan and Siobhan’s friends and contemporaries certainly suffer the ills—and anxieties—of economic precariousness and over indebtedness. But they aren’t unstable consumers, with lives dictated by social (or any other) media.

Yes, the future has been downsized and a sense of impotence about society’s general dysfunction and sheer nastiness reigns. But the people I know feel very much alive; the scariness of a world out of control is more than enough to keep the nerve ends jangling.

And in their personal lives—their relations to family and friends and colleagues—they are not indifferent and cruel. Even out in the public spaces of the city, the vibe is infinitely better than it was in the 1970s. Conviviality is palpable—and can pretty much be counted on in most interactions with strangers. It is the disjunct between this face-to-face decency and the nastiness of our politics and the on-line shit that is most striking to me. For the most part, it seems to me people are remarkably resistant to the poison seeping through the system.

But maybe it’s the bubble I occupy, the world of the professional upper middle class. A word with very few divorces, very little domestic abuse, very little drug and alcohol abuse. Maybe under the polite veneer, chaos, anger, and horrors lurk. It would speak of an unbelievable cover-up if such were the case. I am hardly denying that the opioid epidemic or domestic violence or homophobia or racism exist.

I think what I am trying to say comes down to four claims, all of which I only advance tentatively because I am not by any means convinced I understand what is going on. Here are the claims

Our economics and our politics have become more nasty, but there are strong counter-vailing forces. Those forces widen the gap between public life (the structure of the imagined, non-face-to-face worlds of commerce and politics and the media) and the concrete face-to-face interactions of everyday life (including in the workplace to a large extent). That the strain of this gap has not, thus far, led to serious disruptions is surprising to me. By which, I guess I mean, that the disruptions have only been manifested on the personal level—in domestic violence or drug/alcohol abuse—not in much serious push-back against the inhumanity of corporations treating employees as replaceable parts and subjecting them to increasingly demeaning surveillance.
The impact of the increased nastiness has been felt very unequally. No surprise there since the increased nastiness has been accompanied by huge upsurges in economic inequality. Where people are doing quite well—as they are in Chapel Hill—the social ills of our time are not very manifest. But those class differences do not explain the convivial vibe in America’s cities or the declining crime rates. The “losers” in the next economic regime are, for the most part, still “nice” to others. It is sort of like Charlie Kruzman’s work on the “missing’ Muslim terrorists; given the hordes of losers, it is striking how few of them adopt the kind of indifference or cruelty toward others that Houellebecq claims is general.
So, one the one hand, I incline to an almost economic determinist viewpoint when it comes to domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse, thus explaining why certain classes are more afflicted with these ills than others. (Of course, I am only talking general trends here. The economically fortunate can still be alcoholics, and domestic abusers.) But when it comes to homophobia and racism, I am inclined to say that values other than the economic remain incredibly strong—and perhaps even stronger than—economically driven beliefs and behaviors. This works both ways. Residual decency, the considerate ways we interact with others, prove resistant to the prevailing economic modes of relationship. The economic—for better and for worse—does not carry all before it.
Similarly, let’s no overestimate the effectiveness of media. People have developed all kinds of ways to shut media messages off. The overload of which Berger speaks is itself a disabling factor. Everyone has to create a filter against such bombardment. Confirmation bias suggests that we only hear the messages we are predisposed to hear—which is one way of saying that most messages don’t get through and that the power of messages to change our basic beliefs is severely limited. Conversion is an astoundingly rare experience.

In sum, I just don’t see that generalizations about the despair of our times—and how they have changed basic behaviors tout court—are credible. There is more variety out there than such pronouncements credit. And, frankly, just much more good behavior than they are willing to admit.

American Decline

I have never had much patience for the kind of universal history that trades in ideas like “decline and fall.” I look at Italy or Spain in 2018 and don’t really buy that life for the ordinary Italian in 1470 or ordinary Spaniard in 1570 was better than life for a comparable person today. Power and empire have their obvious pathologies—and their perhaps a little less obvious costs.

Is the US today worse off than it was in 1955? Not for blacks and gays, it would seem obvious to say. Or even for leftists, one might add, given the rather terrifying impact of Joe McCarthy’s ravings. For the grand American middle class, things generally are worse. We can tell ourselves a story about how, coming out of the collective effort and collective sacrifice of the War, we entered the most egalitarian moment in US history, the moment when a grateful nation rewarded all its citizens for what they had done for the war effort. It is certainly true that Harry Truman’s embrace of civil rights (as far as it went) was driven partly by electoral calculations, but also partly by his outrage that black veterans could be treated so shabbily at home. Truman’s ah-ha moment came with the killing (not quite a lynching, but damn close) of a black Army veteran in Georgia in 1947.

American confidence—and rude health—in the post-War years can also be seen in its investments. The interstate highway system, the airports, the public universities and health care facilities were all products of a positive outlook on society and its future. American decline can be measured, it seems to me, in the growing refusal to invest in the future—either in infrastructure or in our children’s health or education—since the 1970s recession. The contrast to China (as illustrated in the most recent issue of The New Yorker) could not be more stark. While they are building universities, roads, high speed trains, we are letting our infrastructure decay all around us. Our subways and highways are falling apart—and our universities are being left to rot.

Of course, this is a story about privatization, about the evils of neoliberalism, about the loss of any sense that the public coffers should finance such things as education, health, or transportation. But we can also tell a story in which it stems from the on-going (and seamlessly endless) backlash from the 1960s, the interminable culture wars. The right has insisted on an “us” vs. “them” narrative since 1968 (at least), where “them” are the uppity blacks of the civil rights movement and the hippies of the anti-war movement, later joined by feminists and gay activists. The right will be damned before spending public money (“our taxes”) on these god-forsaken folks. Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face it all too often is, but to hell with the consequences.

It’s the loss of any sense of fellow-feeling with whole cross-sections of one’s fellow Americans that makes abandonment of infrastructure investment so easy to countenance. We know it is not for lack of funds. So we all get to live in a crumbling physical environment in which higher education and decent health care become increasingly unaffordable. Each day present day America resembles