We First, by Simon Mainwaring: a review

 

There's a lot to like about Simon Mainwaring's We First. This former advertising executive pulls no punches. He tells his former clients that the way they do business has got to go.

Capitalism, Mainwaring points out, is flawed as a system. It leads to class rule, booms, bubbles, and busts. It promotes selfishness and greed. It sacrifices workers and their families and despoils the environment in a short-sighted grab for immediate profit. Capitalism is not sustainable, neither economically, environmentally, or ethically.

I agree with all of this, and I believe that if every reform Mainwaring proposed were put into practice, we would all be better off. Yet I finish the book profoundly dissatisfied.

This book proposes that:

1. By changing their mentality, corporate capitalists will be able to make "purpose" as important as profit.
2. If they won't change on their own, social media-savvy consumers will be able to compel them.
3. The changes they make will create the world we want to live in (and avoid the hell we're headed toward).

But none of these is true.

1. The profit motive is not a matter of mentality. It is the engine of capitalism. Yes, it may just be possible for global corporations to swear off some of the pollution and exploitation that has given them such extraordinary profits in the last thirty years--and it would be a good thing if they did. Always, though, they will feel the pressure to grow or die. Inexorably, they will be forced to push products at the expense of people and the planet. Only a countervailing pressure will force them to put "we first."

2. Consumers on social media can embarrass corporations. We can cost them money by ruining their reputation and reducing their sales. And we should. But this is not enough to compel real change. Mainwaring himself cites the danger of "greenwashing": businesses adopting feel-good policies that don't ultimately change their environmental impact (or simply donating to good causes to buy themselves a better reputation). Corporate PR has kept many the company profitable despite its terrible labor practices. Consumers can add to, but not replace, government regulation, social activism, and labor unions. (Mainwaring never mentions unions. It is a telling silence.)

3. Even if corporations make huge changes in the direction that Mainwaring calls for--and it would be a good thing if they did--they would still be in charge. That means they'd make those changes on the schedule and in the way they find best--not what's best for the rest of us. It's not just corporate greed that's unsustainable. It's corporate power as well.

I give credit to the author for recognizing that capitalism is the problem. I fault him for his naivete in thinking capitalism can be the solution.

Look for the Liberal Label

One of the tools we're going to need to change America is an accurate understanding of what "liberal" means. For 20 years, conservatives and right-wingers have tried to turn the name into a term of abuse. But I think the Rev. Jesse Jackson is right when he reminds us, "America was a liberal idea from the start." 

The Liberal Revolution

To understand what liberalism means, go back to the days when Christian kings and queens ruled their European nations in the name of God. Each person was assigned his or her role in life: rich and powerful aristocrat, poor peasant, serf tied to the land. You were not supposed to have a life of your own. That was considered unnatural, unnecessary, and even sinful. You were supposed to live out your role in this life and hope for a reward in the next one.

But a new idea about the good human life began to spread (first in cities), and its name was liberty, or freedom. To be free meant not to live a life determined in every detail by tradition but to have choices, and to make them as your own reason and tastes told you to. Free men (and to a limited extent, women) had property of their own they didn't owe to a lord or king. Free people made rules together to govern their relations with each other. They called these rules "laws," and they began to consider the laws free people imposed on themselves as equal or superior to the dictates of religion or the commands of the state. So, freedom and self-government became linked.

Notice that in those days at the end of the Middle Ages, the dominant forces shaping people's lives against their wills were government and religious authority. That's why liberals, people who believed in freedom, had to try to limit government and separate church from state. They confronted what they saw as the biggest forces against freedom in their times.

Enter Capitalism

Flash forward to the Industrial Revolution. The new system of production gave the people who had money to invest (capitalists) power over everyone else. If you wanted to work, increasingly, you had to work for them, for the hours and wages they set. If you didn't want to accept their terms, you were "free" to go elsewhere. But capitalists were "free" to wait you out. While you were looking for work at a decent wage, and starving, they were sitting on their wealth--or hiring your neighbor who got desperate earlier than you did.

Freedom in a capitalist system, in other words, had to mean something different from what it meant in the Middle Ages. Government and religious institutions still had the power to impose on people's lives, but so did the rich. And the tools liberals had developed to carve out a sphere of liberty in the middle ages didn't work against the power of capitalism. Indeed, the owners were oppressing the working class, all in the name of freedom!

Separation of church from state didn't separate wealth from power. Government under law could at the same time be government under class rule. As the writer Anatole France put it, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." 

Redefining Liberalism

What was a liberal to do? People who believed in freedom had two choices.

1. They could stick with their old definition of liberty and give up the broader notion behind it: that to be free meant having the chance to live a flourishing human life of your own making. Many traditional-style liberals went with this option. Today, we call them conservatives! (That's why conservatism is such a mixed bag. It includes the people who respect religious tradition and political authority above all, as some people have done since the Middle Ages, and it also includes people who believe in limiting government even if that means inequality and immorality survive and spread.)

2. They could expand their definition of liberty to include ways of ensuring people had the material prerequisities of a good life. Without food, clothing, shelter, and education, the new liberals realized, people are just not in a position to make choices about what kind of life they want to live--or to put those choices into practice.

Liberalism: Still About Freedom

Sometimes conservatives accuse this new kind of liberalism of forgetting about freedom in order to achieve equality. But liberals don't see it that way. FranklinRoosevelt, for instance, spoke of the New Deal as involving Four Freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his or her own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The first two are expressions of traditional liberalism, and "freedom from want" is as clear an expression of the new liberalism as anyone has ever formulated.

The new liberals didn't stop worrying about the power of the state to oppress. They made a calculation that they could use state power to check and constrain the power of capitalism. Agree or disagree, but don't let anyone tell you liberalism is some wild notion ungrounded in reality. Liberalism has produced the greatest freedom as well as the greatest prosperity this country has ever known.

Then why am I not a liberal myself? That will wait for a future post.

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis (ed. Harris & Gorenflo)

 
This is really three books in one.  "Share or Die" is the theme of several essays in the book, and you will find inspirational stories about how people pool resources, from housing to knowledge, in order to live better than they would otherwise.  You'll also find how-to tips about educating yourself, choosing a roommate wisely, and starting worker co-ops and housing co-ops.  Implicit in these essays is a critique of consumption as a lifestyle and of capitalism as a system that demands consumption to survive.

Another set of essays focus more on the "Get Lost Generation," the Millennials or Generation Y, who came of age expecting that a college education would allow them to do it all, have it all, and change whatever discomforted them in the world they inherited.  Society fostered some of these expectations.  Others seem to have been mass delusions.  In any case, the Great Recession dashed a lot of hopes and made young people re-examine the value of a college education, a job, owning a home, marrying (since none of them have turned out as expected, at least since the Great Recession). 

If you are white and from a middle-class background and a member of this generation, you will probably find yourself or people you know portrayed in this book.  For a late Baby Boomer like me, it offers a chance to listen in to conversations and soliloquies I might not otherwise hear.  I do think a limitation of the book is that it doesn't solicit the voices of Black, Latino, and/or immigrant youth.  I have worked with people from those cohorts, and I think they would have a whole different set of concerns (and express shared concerns in a very different way).

The least developed set of essays in the book deal with the "age of crisis" we live in.  When I was in my twenties and attending graduate school, I provided personal care to an old leftist who had suffered a stroke.  One day, I told him that the undergraduates I taught didn't know about Vietnam or Watergate. "They have no sense of history!" I exclaimed.  "Neither do you," he retorted, and reeled off a series of important events from the first half of the twentieth century that I had barely heard of.

So, I am not in any position to blame the writers of this book for exaggerating the unique quality of the age they live in--but that is what they do.  There is no sense that protest began before Occupy Wall Street.  There are no references to the long history of cooperatives in this country, let alone Mondragon, in Spain.  And few of these writers consider that some of the wonderful experiments in collective living, collaborative consumption, and political activism they are engaged in might not survive when they need enough income to raise a child, or health insurance for themselves, or money and leisure to afford to take care of an aging parent.  (The essay "Get on the Lattice" by Ahlander and Kofman is a notable exception.)

We should all read this book--and share it with others.  Then, we should invite friends and strangers to a potluck dinner and discuss what it means to each of us.  That way, we can take up the challenge this book poses and carry it further.

So When IS the Right Time?

You may have noticed a certain audacious argument coming from elite circles about why we shouldn't be letting the Bush era tax cuts expire. The argument is that in the middle of a recession, it's the wrong time to ask people (even very rich people) to pay more in taxes. They need to have more cash in hand so as to spend more, which means industry will produce more, which means they'll hire more people...a virtuous circle leading to economic recovery.

It's funny how corporations, bankers and politicians who used to think they could control the economy simply by raising or lowering interest rates have rediscovered John Maynard Keynes just when they might have to fork over more in taxes. But the audacity of the argument is that it can be used at any time. If we are in recession, we don't want to raise taxes lest it make things worse. If the economy is improving, that's the wrong time, too: do you want to choke off the recovery before it really takes effect? And if the economy is going great guns, why raise taxes and ruin the great thing you've got going? It's as if the whole purpose of government were to avoid taxing people--not to spend taxes wisely for the public good.

Now we are hearing a similar argument about putting people out of work. It seems it's always a good time to "downsize" and never a good time to make sure more people have jobs. "That's the story at State Street Corp., which recently announced the elimination of 1,400 jobs, including 400 in Massachusetts. Those jobs are gone, even though State Street last reported profits of $427 million, up about 20 percent from a year ago," reports Joan Vennochi in the Boston Globe.

There's a word for this in Yiddish: chutzpah. The old joke said that chutzpah means murdering your parents and asking the court for mercy because you're an orphan. The new joke is the chutzpah of corporate fat cats who justify their huge profits because they "give us jobs"--and then increase their profits by taking those jobs away.

The Limits of Power

Americans confuse freedom with a never-ending abundance of goods. As the economic power of the U.S. has declined, we have naively relied on military power to keep the goods flowing. But this has cost us our real freedom: freedom from an imperial presidency that keeps spilling the blood of our own citizens (and the citizens of many other nations) in a fruitless attempt to create a permanent American empire. We need to get over our illusions and embrace what's really possible and necessary. Ending the threat of nuclear war, for instance, is achievable in a way that ending terrorism is not.

These are the lessons that Andrew J. Bacevich wants us to learn. His short book The Limits of Power lays them out in clear language, with compelling examples, in a factual manner but with the courage to point out when American policy is stupid, or absurd, or self-destructive. Bacevich has the experience to write this book. He retired from the Army at the rank of lieutenant colonel and now teaches history at Boston University. He also possesses the moral authority. His son, Andrew Jr., followed his father's path into the military and died in Iraq in 2007.

I tremendously respect Bacevich's honesty, intelligence, and well-placed outrage. He is politically conservative and intellectually rooted in Reinhold Niebuhr and the "enlightened realism" school of foreign policy, whereas I am a man of the Left and rooted in Marx and the analysis of imperialism that grew up in the U.S. around the Vietnam War, but we both see the folly of this country's course in foreign affairs.

Where I think Bacevich falls short is that he roots this problem in a moral failing. Using 19th-century language, he accuses Americans of "profligacy," meaning a wasteful addiction to consumption without any regard for the consequences for ourselves or others in the long term. I can't argue with that as a description, but it falls short as an analysis. Why has our culture grown in this direction? Isn't it because corporate capitalism requires an endlessly expanding market of people to buy things they had no idea they needed before they were produced? When people stop spending more than they can afford, this economy falters, meaning people get thrown out of work. Pretty soon, they can afford even less...and so it goes.

It's not a moral failing that makes the pursuit of abundance the goal of U.S. foreign policy. It's a contradiction within our economic system. Bacevich speaks eloquently about the limits of power, but he does not observe the limits of capitalism that have pushed us toward using power willy-nilly as a last resort to avoid economic decline. It will take more than sermons about profligacy to change something that's so fundamental to the way work, investment, consumption, leisure, and political power are all organized in this country.

It may take a catastrophe. I hope not, and if we avoid a catastrophe, it's because people like Bacevich sounded the trumpet for a new way of thinking. Even if he hasn't totally achieved that himself, he deserves thanks--and your reading time. (You can also see an interview with him on Democracy Now!)

Where's the Outrage--and Where Should It Be?

Money is not the issue. Power is.

A year after causing the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, corporate chieftains are paying themselves big bonuses again. Many of them get more in bonuses than you or I earn in salary or wages all year. The Obama administration is mildly chiding them. Some columnists (like the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson) are calling it an outrage. But what they are looking at is just the symptom, not the disease.

Why do corporate CEO's, top managers, and boards get to decide what to pay one another, in an orgy of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"? Why does the finance industry get to accept billions in bailout money from you and me, then refuse to lend to people with good credit, including the small business around the corner? Why, when the U.S. government just saved corporate capitalism from a complete breakdown, does the government still defer to the corporate capitalists who steered us into the ditch to begin with?

Corporations in this country are more powerful than the people we elect to represent our interests. Until we squarely face that problem, shouting about exorbitant bonuses is just a way of letting off steam.

I am shocked, shocked that there was gambling in our pension insurance system

It sounds like a Washington-based thriller, but it's today's news.

The former head of the nation's pension insurance agency, who last year pushed through a high-risk strategy that shifted the insurance fund heavily into stocks just before the market crash, committed a "clear violation" of agency rules by contacting Wall Street firms that were bidding to oversee the new policy, while also seeking the help of one firm in gaining employment, according to a government report.

All it would need is a murder and an investigator trying to salvage his tattered reputation to sell for $16.95 in paperback!

Seriously, folks, although what Charles E.F. Millard (and I am not making that name up) is alleged to have done is disgusting, he is not the problem. We have a system that makes this kind of thing possible, and close to inevitable. We saw the same kind of malfeasance and self-dealing 20+ years ago, in the Savings & Loan scandal. As I wrote on March 31: "We cannot rely on capitalism to save us from the shortfalls of capitalism. It takes serious government policy, made by grown-ups, to do that. "

It's Still the Same Sad Story

This is really big news--except that it's not new at all.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation may go bankrupt, and if it does, a lot of people--up to 44 million people--who are expecting to collect pensions after they retire may be pinching pennies instead.

Unlike 401k's, pensions are supposed to deliver a fixed amount of money that people can count on in retirement. And just like the FDIC insures your bank account against bank failure, the PBGC is supposed to insure your pension against a corporate pension fund running dry. You would think the very first priority of an insurer like that would be to take care of its own money. But according to the Boston Globe, "Just months before the start of last year's stock market collapse...the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds." Well, we know what has happened to the value of those investments!

This is really big news because so many older Americans will never get the chance to make up for those losses. If they are to be saved, it may cost the taxpayers "several hundred billion dollars"--on top of the money we are already spending to bail out the banks.

But it is also an old story. The name of the story is "double or nothing." During the Bush administration, the director of the PBGC realized that it was falling behind on its obligations. According to the Globe again, he said that "the prior strategy of relying mostly on bonds would never garner enough money to eliminate the agency's deficit." His answer? Gamble!

This was the same reasoning that led the Savings & Loans banks to make risky investments in the 1980's. Before that, they had been resolutely local, conventional, and conservative. Then, they tried to make up shortfalls by buying and flipping real estate for a profit and by investing in all kinds of high-risk ventures, foreign and domestic. We the taxpayers ended up on the hook then too.

We cannot rely on capitalism to save us from the shortfalls of capitalism. It takes serious government policy, made by grown-ups, to do that.