Remarks on America's anti-democratic neo-liberal business culture

Because it is irrational, American business culture is not only anti-democratic but pseudo-liberal. Customers are managed through emotional intelligence, false solicitude, and psychological normalizing judgement. In this way, all of our business management, of employees and customers as well as competitors and the potential customers that a larger public is considered to be, is essentially a kind of friendly fascism. The extreme of this is found in California, and in a not dissimilar way among middle class whites in the South. The business culture of the United States is essentially Protestant and Anglo-Saxon.

It is not necessarily white, nor is the religious or ethnic/national background of the person you are dealing with, say on the other end of the phone, a very important determinant of what they are like. What determines how business people and those with managerial authority treat others is more than anything the business culture. And this is our country’s overwhelmingly dominant business culture, everywhere, including in New York City, perhaps the least exclusively American part of the country with its many Jews, immigrants, and artists, and its historically deeper ties culturally to Europe. Our business culture places almost no emphasis on those forms of propriety that have anything to do with reason. The customer may be ‘always right’, but that really just means that he or she should be managed emotionally. The customer is in fact presumed to be almost always stupid.

This also means that the business firm manages its customers as well as its employees in a way not very different from the police. For management is policing. This is why from a Marxist point of view, the ‘state’ actually includes all business enterprises of any kind, however owned or whatever their management structure, insofar as they interact with other persons or organizations, in that management of subjected labor, which now includes the life of customers and workers in their off-work lives, just as indirectly it at least partly includes the lives of families and social networks, which have always had the primary task sociologically of reproducing the social relationships of the economy. Thus, any business culture is one of both repressive and ideological state authority. It is ideological because it must legitimate the social and property relations involved, and it is repressive because the demands of business, which are those of profit, driving production, exchange, consumption, and investment, and those demands always rest on a ‘bottom line’ and by their very nature exclude all possibilities of existence that are not readily commodified or are external or marginal to the transaction.

The United States is now a declining world power that historically was close culturally to the Atlantic European powers of England and France. Since the beginning of neoliberalism after 1968 (particularly in the period 1970-73), there has been a marked cultural shift, following a political one, towards a globalism that the United States wants to lead but increasingly does not control (it fought for control of it during the Cold War period, which saw a long series of foreign wars and interventions aimed at keeping the rest of the world in the American-led economic system, with compatible governments rather than nationalizing or socialist ones), and also towards the rising powers of East Asia, which in this period began to include not only Japan but also several other Pacific nations including China. Because of this, much and often militant energy was put into making American culture more less European. The rise of the 'New Age' ideologies which might be called a right-wing liberalism following the hippie culture of the 60s, now going pro and making money, fit into that nicely, giving us what for me is an idea of 'California'. This accompanied too the triumphant individualism styling itself as creative that was perhaps best represented by Apple Computers, whose introduction of the wired world followed shortly on the invention of semiconductors in electronics, making possible miniaturization. Often what was polemically attacked as the culture was rebranding itself with new styles, were things like racial domination, or opposition to 'patriarchal' or 'heteronormative' gender and sexuality notions, which gave a direction to the nascent feminism, which along with gay liberation, were the most successful and far-reaching cultural shifts in the postwar era, both facilitated by the rise of office work over the earlier factory-centered model of production. Lots of things were polemically opposed, and more in social life and its ethos and mores than politics proper, though certainly these themes and memes would heard their constantly. But behind or accompanying all of these cultural shifts, which seemed to be towards greater liberty, and against more closed models of personality and culture that were supposedly authoritarian and backward, with all of this was also an implied attack on America's ideological paternity, which was given by the old Atlantic Alliance that dominated this country from the first colonies to the end of the 1960s. France was always the alternative culture, which remained true in universities, in large part because of the intellectual fecundity of France at the top of its educational hierarchy, and of course also for reasons of cultural fit. America has its own native philosophical traditions, but not, like France, a theoretical culture. Except in the better college and university departments of the various humanities. Which get attacked typically in times of economic austerity, and arguably now are in the early stages of being destroyed in this country, as our educational system has been thoroughly commodified such the mind itself has shifted from reason and creativity to obediently answering multiple choice questions with a definite predetermined answer that is known as part of knowledge's set and archive of representable facts, so that in fact the smart person just knows the right answers, which ultimately just means that in office and sales or service environments too he or she knows how to do the right thing, or do what they are told, or perform their job function properly. If they seem to fail to or resist doing so in any way, which can be bodily and half- or un-consciously, then they can be declared 'mentally ill', and removed from normal society, at least in theory. Another Western country of course not so long ago and very infamously did this to the misfits who were the Jews. Other categories seem to have replaced them, but they were never alone, and for 500 years other things too, including blackness, played a not dissimilar role; indeed, Nazism in some ways was Germany's attempt to become a colonial power as a continental empire created in a war of conquest, and it was therefore modeled on the cleansing of new territories from natives who were in Western terms, primitives, outside its civilization. Europe got a bad rap, America saved it twice, at little risk or damage, comparatively, to itself (not none, certainly, nor does any sane person wish that war had been decided oppositely). Then it set out both to defeat international social and political movements leading to socialist or nationalizing exoduses from the global capitalist system of markets, and also to defeat the 'communist' alternative, and it eventually did both, the former with much violence and repression, which only really came to the light of a mass public awareness during the Vietnam debacle, which was also a massacre with industrial chemicals that in its very different rivaled other more obviously immoral ones that were not part of a war proper, as in the short-lived German European empire. England and France, the old colonial powers, triumphed with the United States, and in uneasy alliance with the socialists in Europe, in the government in what was inherited in the Russian empire. But it was the American century as far as America and Western Europe were concerned. The 60s was an upheaval that had many actual and possible consequences and meanings. Those that stuck were the ones that fit neoliberalism and its cultural freedoms, and that worked well with our gender and sexuality radical reformism, which fit an older American cultural pattern much better than is recognized. Liberalism in the old, English sense, has remained to this day a powerful ideology. With the only caveat that, thirty years after the fall of socialism in Europe, the world sucks and everyone knows it. But it is important to recognize that, and with all the obvious historical justice of this, since the American empire was built along with the triumphant European ones, with colonialism and, in these American lands, north, south, central, Carribean, slavery, -- it is important to see that in certain ways the whole movement of American culture away from its founding was to move away from European cultural models. They were discredited and while America's critics may speak of the same objects and with the same disdain and militancy of polemical opposition, the loser, culturally, was Europe. And one thing that was lost, except as it continues, is the cultural dominance of France. It remains a very dominant force, if not an exclusive one, in the world of ideas at least in the humanities and social sciences. But American youth are continually trying to be less European and scornful of those who are more so, even when they don't realize that that is all that they are rebelling against. This gave us the New Age, which idolizes the culture of antiquity only, not anything more modern, in East and South Asia. It also thinks, in the same kind of anti-imperialist gesture that used to speak of 'world music', which simply means all of everything that isn't European-influenced classical music or traditional folk music. The New Age was little more than an ideology, because it tries to effectuate an idea of something that doesn't really even exist; it was invented. And to serve a purpose. Popularized were Stoical notions that assimilated superficially Buddhist and other Eastern notions, including Taoism. These were very popular in the 60s and 70s, and still are, though the sources of this trend lie in Thoreau and other aspects of the 19th century American literary renaissance (principally, the 1850s). Japan, Korea, China, and other countries are actually a lot more interesting in their real artistic culture today than the 'capitalism with Asian values' that China's government announces as a cover for an authoritarianism that pretends to stand in the reflection of Confucius and other sages of antiquity. Anyway, we have this pseudo-liberal cultural ethos. It was created as part of America's cultural bid for a window-dressing of its project of global influence. It was false. Your older siblings went to the Asian temple, which they misrecognize as a grab bag of chic notions thin on substance but they can appreciate, and all he got was a policeman asking him if he's ok. And you know you had better say yes sir, or he will make it so you are not.

Our political culture is essentially English, with an often militantly republican twist, which is officially egalitarian as far as status is concerned and liberal in ways that turn on property ownership. American global dominance may prove to have been historical a transitional one between that of England and France and that of China. On the other hand, the English and French languages will continue to include primary speakers in India, Africa, and elsewhere.

I draw my ability to think about anything from a Western tradition, that includes its philosophy and mathematics and sciences as well as its arts and literature. To me, America’s becoming less like France is a loss. The reason has much to do with the difference between English liberalism and Continent rationalism. It may be interesting to see how in years and decades to come the Chinese but also the Indians and Africans deal with this. Nor are the Spanish, Portugeuese and Arabic speaking parts of the world in imminent danger of disappearing. Maybe the United States should try to invent itself culturally as post-colonial, and not merely multicultural, in the dominant liberal ideology that most of the country shares. It is certainly a myth that our great social problems mostly have to do with the marginal status of this or that, or these or those, minorities. One of the great things about this country is that we do not exactly have a native ethnicity and only partly do a language. We should make Spanish the second language and instruction in it obligatory as French is in Canada. Though even a postcolonial identity, which can work as part of a state ideology precisely because it is not only founded on fact but functions as myth, a legitimating story of our identity that we tell ourselves — even that will not save us from our irrationality.

It’s possible to live with it, but the price that amounts to having to rely on what is ultimately a property-based liberalism, that is, ideology of liberty. A postcolonial national ethos in America will be one of multiculturalism. That is here to stay, and it applies to all possible demographical identities. That the state can count them as identities to be name and counted, a matter which serves ends and motives that are not only those of liberty and equality, is the sufficient condition of these identities mattering. They matter such that everyone must allow for them. This has been in recent decades one of the most dominant themes in the explicitly and latently political character of our social and cultural life. It is debated still, and in ways that divide among the two major parties. But it really is close to fait accompli. We need to realize this and move on. If there is a real social divide, it is not always the visible one. It is between capital, which profits and invests, and labor power, which manages populations as counting for the economy and the state apparatus that is part of it, so that their mobility is controlled, possibilities defined (and they are reductive and meager: just look at our ‘mental health’ system, now the dominant way of managing the populace: Does your doctor want to encourage you to be a creatively thinking citizen of the kind of true republic we only believe we have, or does he or she merely expect you to do your job and perform your other life duties, familial, governmental, and otherwise, not suffer from some social or personal problem that would get in the way and thus be a ‘mental illness’? Do those drugs they give you enhance your creativity, make you a more interesting parent or lover or friend, do they help you realize potentialities you did not know you had? Or do they just keep your symptoms of dysfunctionality from causing you to ‘break down’ like a machine that is no longer obeying the instructions given it by its programmer? Careful, many people in this country think that God is such a programmer; it is easily seen that this is nonsense (whether that leads you to some better idea of God, or just some better, perhaps happier, way of living).

China is not a more democratic country but a more managed one. It is arguable that the Chinese only have, as monarchies were thought to have before the modern revolutions, subjects and not citizens proper, who participate in making the state and what happens in and with and by it. The French have a stronger state, which is tied in to the educational system at its center, much as the military is central to the American economy. Because of this, the French are as purposeful as we are (and we are that) but also rational, as we tend not to be. Reason, argument, and intellectual are dirty words in America, they are things people do whom no one likes. Which is why we are so much more prey to demagogues, as the last four years have seen on our national stage. The English do not have an alternative at all, but a political culture that resembles ours because ours was built on it, with the differences that have to do with our militant republican liberalism. (I use these terms as they are used in political philosophy, not journalistic popular rhetoric: the entire country in the main is republican and liberal; it wants to be sometimes egalitarian and democratic, but mostly that is ideology. This may be a promising fact about us; our history as a nation is not over). England is a society that consecrates moderation above all and seeks only reforms, though its class structure is highly marked like almost nowhere else, because of the persistence of an aristocracy and monarchy, which probably help to explain that nation's decadence, backwardness, and relative absence of prominence in any of the arts, except those it shares with the United States (hence, British pop music).

Declining world powers have often been sites of great cultural creativity, as France has been in the last hundred years, a quality shared with cultures that are sites of cultural clash between two or more seemingly incompatible components. The dominant cultures in the world of philosophy and 'theory' insofar as it affects the arts and thinking about the social and political, are now French and Italian. But the Americans often read them and I think American theory is doing well and has a future. One thing I find potentially useful for us is the recent American Hegel renaissance in philosophy. The reason is that Hegel is the philosopher of reason and a social theory and thus idea of a republic that is based upon it. Of course we should not over rate it, but there may be little danger of that outside the seminar room. Our culture has always thought little of the life of the mind. And yet, our principal city is still the center of the art world, as it has been since it shifted from France for political reasons in 1940.

The ultimate truth in all of this may be the surprising one suggested by the remark of an African writer that "the Bantu Tolstoy, Mr. Bellow, is Tolstoy." Now look what we can do with his writings.