OK, OK, we (me and my reading habits) have been ranting and raging against the New Bush Order, but dare we forget the roots of this current situation lay in the bullish "New Economy" 90s of the Clinton era. Bill was charming, intelligent and personable, and he manipulated crowds just as much as the common-man Dubya persona... Bill, you smiled and kissed us while screwing us!
I was reading my trusty copy of Marx and Modernity in preparation for my second qualifying exam and came across Thomas Frank's essay "Architecture of a New Consensus." Reading it reminded me, yes we need to get rid of the Bush gang, but are the democrats really going to change anything?-- other than that we can conduct our sins in a more public, open way--the structure will be the same only the names will have changed.
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Architecture of a New Consensus
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Of course all of us need to think about our roots (rad-) ... Annalee Newitz does a fine job of thinking about Thomas Frank's political heritage.
"Anticapitalism For the Masses: Tom Frank Takes on the New Economy" by Annalee Newitz
(published by San Francisco Bay Guardian)
NOBODY KNOWS JUST what to make of Tom Frank. Is he a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism, or a neoreactionary who wants to bring back the good old politics of 1930s America? Talking with the guy becomes a political version of the Saturday Night Live skit "It's Pat," where people try to guess the dorkily ambiguous Pat's gender. Journalists who have met with Frank to talk about his recent book One Market under God (Simon and Schuster, 2000) have all tried to test Frank by placing him in situations where he'd be forced to reveal his actual political orientation.
AlterNet tantalized him by meeting for coffee at the Sony Metreon to see what he'd make of hypercapitalism in action; Salon teased him with an Old Navy foray; and the LA Weekly spent paragraphs speculating about Frank's thrift-store retro wardrobe in seductive detail. The whole point seemed to be that Frank, as an antibusiness writer, was so rare that he ought to be the object of sociological experiments. He could be used to resolve philosophical quandaries: What does a real live anticapitalist act like in a world utterly saturated by capitalism? Can he exist at all?
When Steve Rhodes and I met with Frank, we worried more about getting the minidisk player set up for the interview than we did about checking to see if Frank would evaporate in a retail environment. So we settled down in an empty, nondescript cafeteria to talk about capitalism and labor. Frank is the punk rock whippersnapper whose smart, churlish opinions about pop culture, self-published in his zine the Baffler, won him underground acclaim. He was also the academic with hip tastes whose first book, The Conquest of Cool (based on his Ph.D. thesis), revealed that the radical, "cool" culture of the 1960s was actually something Madison Avenue invented to sell 7UP and Volkswagens.
While his work has always been clearly antagonistic to capitalism – particularly the culture industry – Frank's latest book is his first to offer a sustained invective against the American market economy. In an era when analysts and politicians praise the new economy as if it were a benevolent supernatural force, One Market under God manages to be both pleasingly blasphemous and stirringly un-American.
But if Frank's writing is so recognizably leftist, why is it appearing in pro-capitalist publications like Adweek and the Industry Standard? And why, as the LA Weekly wondered ad nauseam, does Frank dress like such a square? Both are weirdly compelling questions. Leaving aside the clothing issue for now, the answer is partly one that Frank himself addresses in his latest book. He explains that capitalists are mindfuckers – they'll use the language and organizing strategies of prolabor populists to make themselves look like nice folks who are on the side of the little guy. Corporate giants, to earn workers' devotion, will feign an almost socialistic generosity by, for example, giving employees shares in their company. As long as we keep pretending that those stock options are worth something financially and politically, Frank warns, all us little guys will be duped into believing that the big Bills and Ruperts are our buddies, not our bosses.
Perusing the latest voting melodrama in a discarded copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, Frank noted that it's the oxymoronic "market populists" who have leveraged George W. Bush into the presidency. Somehow, hard-working middle Americans have become convinced that a highfalutin, pampered rich kid is their ally. Capitalists, mourns Frank, have stolen the idea of populism from the working class, perverted it, and sold it back to them in worthless stock options and senseless campaign slogans.
Thus it's not surprising that Tom Frank, one of the nation's better-known anticapitalist thinkers, has found himself co-opted by the very market-happy system that he critiques. In the pages of the new economy's business magazines, he has become the populist who was eaten by the free market. And who can blame the guy? It's not like he's ever pretended to be anything but prolabor. And, as he points out pragmatically, "I have to eat. I have a child on the way. I'll write for anyone who will pay me, as long as they don't force me to change what I have to say. And I also don't want to preach solely to the choir." But there's the rub – he doesn't have to change what he's saying to be co-opted. His unchecked, uncensored dissenting voice becomes "proof" that corporate capitalism isn't all bad – after all, even the slick biz mags will publish the occasional surly bit of prolabor populism. Plus, there's the added attraction of having Frank teach your new economy managers and execs how exactly the masses can be brainwashed into thinking that capitalism equals populism.
What's a leftist intellectual or labor organizer to do, faced with this degree of economic doublethink in the mass media? Frank's solution is to turn his attention back to the politics and economic policies of the 1930s, to revive America's strong tradition of prowelfare democracy. "I try to avoid nostalgia," he says, "I'm not a simpleton. But the way our country has been heading in the last 20 years is a mistake. The 1930s ideals were more socially just. And many other countries haven't abandoned that path, so it's not as if welfare democracy died out in the '30s."
In a rare utopian moment at the conclusion of One Market under God, Frank explains that only a renewed devotion to true 1930s-style populism, where the people come before corporations, will lead us away from the false belief that capitalism can serve the interests of anyone but the wealthy elite. In the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle, Frank's utopianism here isn't entirely misplaced.
And it's good to see Frank finding solace in the idea of political justice, since The Conquest of Cool was so resoundingly fatalistic: all radical counterculture, he claimed there, is doomed to serve the interests of advertising, and there's no way out. Now that he's looking to political action, rather than the messy world of cultural subversion, he seems more comfortable predicting that well-informed individuals can see their way free of what he calls "the stupidity of capitalism."
But I promised I would return to the conundrum of the way Frank dresses. Why have so many journalists freaked out about his wardrobe? Despite his punk rock roots, Frank's sartorial orientation ("All vintage," he reports) makes him look like the business managers whose work both fascinates and revolts him. I, too, have known the pleasures of wearing business suits, so I don't want to suggest that such trivialities as clothes should always be politically meaningful. And yet I think his charmingly reactionary clothing, combined with his fiercely retro leftist politics, serve as a reminder that Frank may have uncritically embraced old-fashioned cultural values along with down-home radical labor populism. Maybe that's what makes us focus on his sleek jackets and pressed slacks: their conservatism is not entirely ironic.
And it's cultural conservatism that we risk reviving when we idolize labor movements of the past. As historians like David Roediger (author of The Wages of Whiteness) have pointed out, labor politics in the 1930s "worked" partly because most unions were white-only. Union leaders often played into the racism of the white masses who felt that their livelihoods were threatened not just by the fat cat capitalists, but also by working-class blacks, Asian Americans, and Latinos. And prolabor politics were also notoriously sexist (not to mention homophobic). While a few women like Emma Goldman became outspoken leaders of leftist labor movements, by and large women were excluded from participating in the kind of macho, beer-swilling union-boy culture that 1930s muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair celebrated in The Jungle.
And thus it's always a bit disturbing when a leftist like Frank embraces the politics of a historical period known for a populism that recognized mostly white men as "the people" and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves. Can you bring back the populism of the 1930s without all the social injustices that went with it? Probably not. We need to remember that prolabor politics are merely one part of a populist agenda; antiracism and feminism are also integral. Like many prolabor leftists, sometimes Frank looks so far back into history for his inspiration that he forgets about the other populist revolutions that are still going on around him right now.
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