This lazy weekend finds me sitting on the front porch, soaking in sunshine and John Gray's 1998 critique of global capitalism, False Dawn . I picked this book up at the big Kingswood rummage sale in Sioux Falls back in April. It was in a small eclectic collection of books read by a young woman who was selling hot dogs from a big roaster in her garage. She also sold me a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, which I just finished reading yesterday. I can now turn my reading attention fully toward Gray's arguments, which I found fascinating from my first browsing between garage sales that sunny April afternoon.
In Chapter 5, Gray addresses "The United States and the Utopia of Global Capitalism." Some utopia -- Gray shows us a society built on a free market myth that tears apart its own social fabric more thoroughly than has occurred in any other Western nation.
[p110] America today is not a society in which an affluent majority looks on with complacent disdain at an underclass mired hopelessly in poverty and exclusion. it is a society in which anxiety pervades the majority. For most Americans, the ledge of security on which they live has not been so narrow since the 1930s.
Gray proceeds to list a number of ways that our mania for the free market has increased our anxiety even while promoting overall on-paper economic growth. Global capitalism has made it easier for companies to pack up and leave for climes with cheaper labor and operating costs, without regard for the impact on the workers and neighborhoods they leave behind. Our free market ideology has dismantled "the protective support of welfare provisions and labour unions" [112] that might soothe the anxiety of workers worried about keeping their jobs or surviving the transition into new jobs. The market pushes families to seek two incomes, then makes demands on workers that "may, and often do, pull partners in directions that are difficult to reconcile" [112] -- i.e., toward less connection, less cooperative and hands-on parenting, and more divorce. Gray makes some important comparisons to other societies we often disdain for their economic failures:
[112] How many American households eat together as families? How many children live in the same neighbourhoods or cities as their parents? If an American becomes unemployed, can he or she find support from an extended family, as can Spaniards and Italians in European countries? American families are more fractured than those of any European country, including Russia, where the extended family has survived over seventy years of communism.
Pointing to the United States' inferiority to Europe in protecting family values, Gray goes on to question even the superiority of our economic outcomes. He notes that US employment figures are often exaggerated, failing to account for millions of workers stuck in part-time work and millions more laboring anxiously in "a contingent labour force of contract workers" [112] who lack benefits and long-term stability. Citing a 1997 Financial Times article [Richard Layard, "Clues to Prosperity," 1997.02.17], Gray says that between 1988 and 1994, unemployment among US males aged 25-55 was 14%, compared with 11% in France, 13% in the UK, and 15% in Germany [113]. The US also achieves low unemployment numbers by throwing ten times as many of its citizens in prison than than the UK does [113]. Gray offers Edward Luttwak's grim portrait of working America:
As entire industries rise and fall much faster than before, as firms expand, shrink, merge, separate, 'downsize' and restructure at an unprecedented pace, their employees at all but the highest levels must o to work one day without knowing whether they will have their job the next. That is true of virtually the entire employed middleclass, professionals included. Lacking the formal safeguards of European employment protection laws or prolonged post-employment benefits, lacking the functioning families on which most of the rest of humanity still relies to survive hard times, lacking the substantial liquid savings of their middleclass counterparts in all other developed countries, most working Americans must rely wholly on their jobs for economic security -- and must therefore now live in conditions of chronic acute insecurity. [Edward Luttwak, "Turbo-Charged Capitalism and Its Consequences," London Review of Books, 1995.11.02, p. 7]
Has Gray here identified the source of the culture-wide anxiety Michael Moore tried to identify in Bowling for Columbine (and which anxiety surely figures in Moore's latest effort, Sicko, which opens this weekend)? What are we so afraid of, Moore asked, that leads us to lock our doors and buy millions of guns?
Maybe we are afraid of our own system. Workers in the lower and middle classes can see very clearly why they are anxious: they aren't getting paid a lot, prices are going up, and they are always one merger, one downsizing, one outsourcing away from unemployment. They can't put down roots, because they have to be ready to move across the state or across the country to keep their current jobs or seek replacement jobs. Everyday working folks know full well what's causing their anxiety: the free market system.
But then they realize they can't blame the free market system, because free market mythos is all wrapped up with American mythos. Jobs and companies come and go; bosses have the freedom to hire and fire as they see fit; the bottom line is all that matters, the Golden Rule (he who has the gold makes the rules) -- to question those free market principles is tantamount to treason, or blasphemy. To suggest that maybe the free market ought to be tempered a bit to provide a little more job security or give people more time with their families does more than risk accusations of socialism. The workers themselves feel their anxiety reveals an infidelity to the American civil religion of capitalism and individualism.
Thus unable publicly or even privately to place the blame for their anxiety on the proper agent (and thus experiencing even more psychic stress), American workers must transfer that blame onto acceptable subjects. The scapegoats we choose: immigrants ("freeloaders sneaking into our country, can't even learn the language!"), minorities ("lazy welfare queens!"), promiscuous women ("if they'd be responsible, this country wouldn't have all these problems!"), homosexuals ("it ain't natural!"), and anyone else we can label as outside the proper bounds of wholesome American behavior, as outside of "us." Never mind that the real threat to that "us" is the free market system, to which the bonds of social cohesion are but one more set of inconvenient obstacles to efficiency and profit. We can't admit it, not without peril to the integrity of our American worldview and our very sanity (if you can call it that). But as Gray points out, the neoconservative devotion to both global free markets and family values are incompatible. If we install the free market as the fundamental organizing principle of society, we must accept the anxiety and disruption of our families and broader social institutions that the free market unbound cannot accommodate.
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