The perverse logic of win-win-ism
by Tom Sullivan
I’ve written for a decade about the Midas cult possessed with turning every human interaction into a transaction (gold). The cult believes any product or service provided by “we the people” that might even in theory be provided by the private sector is a crime against capitalism.
I’ve described the modern corporate model for capitalism as another of those “invention gone wrong” tales common in fiction. In Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) and in films since the early 20th century, those wayward human inventions are always technological or biological. In lived reality, they are legal: corporations, “artificial persons” conceived in law and born on paper (once, anyway).
In this Dutch mini-documentary, Anand Giridharadas (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World“) has the number of “market world” and those who benefit from it at the expense of everyone else.
May the 2010s be the final decade of the Age of Capital.
May 2020 usher in an Age of Reform.
Alternate tweet: Anand says things to the Dutch Parliament because his own wouldn’t invite him to say them. pic.twitter.com/oZtE8BMERC— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 25, 2019
Here is the full 30-min. documentary:
Giridharadas describes the plutocratic class behind the Second Gilded Age and the “win-win” ideology plutocrats use to promote it (and themselves) [timestamp 9:30]:
The idea of win-win has become a very crucial gospel of this market-world religion. And what win-win-ism says is that it is possible to fight for the least among us, it is possible to fight inequality, reduce poverty, without hurting those on top. In fact, in ways that enrich and create profit for those on top. Now, this is an amazing promise. I mean, what a notion, right? If you apply this to other domains, you say, Wow! We can empower women in ways that will increase men’s power? Wow! How do you do that? Wow! We can end slavery in ways that will make white plantation owners even richer than they were before? Wow! What a great promise. Sounds wonderful, right? Well, it’s a lie. It’s a lie.
The lie shows up when the one percent — the people who benefit most — burnish their self-images by trying to do good for the people harmed by the system they themselves created.
Giridharadas in essence extends Upton Sinclair’s 1934 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Rich people promote ideas that justify their elevated place in society, as they have since the age of kings [timestamp 24:10]:
Through their patronage of ideas festivals, things like TED, publications, etc., the plutocrats have fostered a kind of set of court thinkers within the palace who supply the justifications for their rule. And some of these people were never serious thinkers to begin with, but some of them were serious who got tempted into [being] the kind of thinkers who don’t challenge the fundamental dynamics and equations of a winners-take-all society.
Where Giridharadas’s analysis falls short is in emphasizing the players to the exclusion of the underlying legal structure that created and sustains the current plutocracy. That structure is fundamental to the modern corporate form humans created half a century after “Frankenstein” first appeared in print. As I’ve suggested, that system has since metastasized. It had help:
Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.
Whether it’s turning your child’s education from a shared public cost into a corporate profit center; or turning the principle of one-man, one-vote into one-dollar, one-vote; or carbon tax credits and accounting tricks for addressing rising sea levels; questioning the universal application of a business approach to any human need or problem prompts the challenge, “Do you have something against making a profit?” A more subtle form of red-baiting, this ploy is supposed to be a conversation stopper. Yes? You’re a commie. Game over.
“We are not fated to live this way,” historian Steve Fraser told Bill Moyers five years ago. Indeed, there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults” (Robert Nozick) since before Hammurabi. Capitalism in its present form is a new isotope toxic to those who fuel it with their labor. It is system in which the people no longer govern. They are ruled by those who would make serfs of us again, telling us only by their being kings can the rest of us flourish.
We can imagine a better world, Giridharadas believes. We can end the age of capital and usher in the age of reform. Let’s hope we find the will to create it.
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Thanks very much for reading and supporting my work all these years. I am very grateful. — digby
