Marxist Book Notes: Capitalist “Winners” Take All
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,
Anand Giridharadas (Knopf, 2018)
By Charles Brover
“I don’t know about you people, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”Understandably, Marxists never tire of quoting the salient passage in the German Ideology that describes the dependent relationship between the ruling ideas in a society and the class that rules:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it…. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”As it did to Marx in 1845, this feature of class rule seems to us no less self-evidently true today. However, we rarely get the opportunity to look behind the curtain of mystification at the intricate processes—conscious and unconscious—through which the idea wizards conjure and disseminate their ideologically dominant illusions. Journalist Anand Giridharadas, liberal critic and “frenemy” to the rich and powerful, provides just such a peek in his recent book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (Knopf, 2018). Giridharadas takes his readers along with him to the Aspen Institute, Davos World Economic Forum, Summit at Sea, Clinton Global Initiative, and other fabulous destinations where the super-rich gather in private to cook up their “solutions” to public problems, congratulate themselves for their social responsibility, and continue to do very well by “doing good.”
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Over the last half century of one-sided class warfare, the ruling class has captured all of the rewards of increased productivity at the expense of workers. Capitalism has generated a new gilded age of extreme inequality and a society based on exploitation, racism, war and environmental degradation. And now when it is widely understood that these plutocrats have caused and are continuing to cause these problems, they, at the pinnacle of their class, demand to be…What? The leaders of social change. They want to take control of the very idea of social change. As they tell it at their confabs, only their market-based initiatives can “make the world a better place.” They refer to themselves as being in the “social justice business.” There are even anti-poverty consulting companies such as TechnoServe, which advertises itself as “Business Solutions to Poverty.” They call it “win-win.” But only they are the real winners of capitalism’s rigged game.
In response to the growing lack of trust in the government, the ideological strategy of the business elite has been to push the idea that urgent social solutions can skip the “middle man” of government and allow them to solve the world’s problems directly in unaccountable arrangements. In this sense they mirror Trump’s appeal to a sector of his voting base that saw him as a businessman not a politician. The con-man-in-chief declared, “Only I can fix it.”
Giridharadas has long been a detractor of big philanthropy and a debunker of the plutocrats’ claim that they are helping to solve the world’s problems. His thesis is simple: the do-gooder tycoons of tech and finance cause the problems they claim to be fixing; then they use their huge wealth and organized “giving back” in a self-interested project to maintain and increase the benefits conferred upon them by the economic status quo; and they hold fast to their class power while trying to improve their image in the mind of the public (and, for a few, to assuage evident guilt). For the epigraph to his book Giridharadas calls upon a particularly insightful observation by Tolstoy:
Despite his well-known views, a number of these billionaire “winners” sat down with Giriharadas to explain, justify, confess doubts and complain about their motives and goals for lavish giving. Some of his profiles are of sincere liberal do-gooders who become disillusioned, others of cynical, self-righteous, and self-dealing egotists. Think Bill Clinton. These interviews inform the thoughtful, sometimes damning, sometimes sympathetic personal profiles that comprise the best reading in the book.“I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.” (Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence, 1886)
“MarketWorld” Is Everywhere
“MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened business people and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and a state of mind.” –Winners Take All, p. 30From college campuses to the boardrooms of private equity vulture capitalists to the stages of TED and lucrative speaking circuits, to the U.S. Congress, and “reform” movements of all kinds, the language and values of business reign supreme. Public problems they insist can best be solved by market-based private initiatives. Poverty, education, healthcare, global warming, any other problems, the market will solve them one little wise and generous investment at a time.
Those of us in the field of education know better than most the disastrous influences of MarketWorld on our public schools in the name of market-based reform. The goals, methods and values of business are entirely inappropriate to educating the young. The market-based solutions pushed by the hedge-fund managers, consultants and know-it-all plutocrats that educational researcher, Diane Ravitch calls the “billionaire boys club” are the driving force of the privatizing initiatives seeking to dismantle public education.
From the union-busting charter school movement that puts public schools in private hands to the toxic over-testing and data-obsessed bureaucrats who follow the protocols and logic of business analysis, to the economists who evaluate teachers on a “value-added” metric, to the Teach for America temps, human students are processed as if they were widgets to be battered into shape and prepared for the market.
People who know nothing at all about education but have been successful in business are presumed to be qualified to design and manage public education systems. But analyzing and optimizing for profits is inimical to the development of human social and intellectual potential. How did Joel Klein get to be New York City’s education chancellor? In some cases, as with Betsy DeVos, they don’t even have to be successful in business; they need only to be rich and attend the right conferences.
When describing the language used in MarketWorld, Giridharadas is at his best. To get on the big money speaking circuit and to be recognized as a “thought leader” one has to know how to talk to the MarketWorld crowd. To be accepted in MarketWorld and latch on to the billions of dollars at stake, the reformers, “innovators,” entrepreneurs and “impact investors” must present “actionable ideas” for change that do not implicate the ruling class in the problems that they have created.
Giridharadas provides colorful and depressing examples of how smoothly people slip into business-speak when big bucks are on offer. No talk about the economic system, or analysis of historic developed economic structures – only symptoms are safe territory. So they talk a lot about poverty in terms of increasing opportunity, but the word “inequality” is verboten. Inequality implies that too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands and points to questions of how that wealth has been made. Inequality begins to suggest that there might be perpetrators of this situation. The MarketWorlders will have none of that. The “solution” most welcomed is increased entrepreneurism. If only government regulations were eased.
They are all for doing good as long as they continue to do well. For instance Giridharadas profiles Amy Cuddy, who became famous and rich on the MarketWorld speaking circuit. Although she had spent 20 years in academia as a feminist critic of the structures of sexist oppression, when she spoke to the MarketWorlders, she presented the “solution” of adopting Wonder Woman power-poses to increase women’s empowerment. There is probably an app for that. She became an instant star. That is the pattern… That’s the way of it. What of her critical voice? It had been drowned out. Despite her super hero status on the speaking circuit, she told Giridharadas she was “frustrated”: “Everyone wants me to come in, and basically they want me to address prejudice and diversity and fixing it. First of all without saying those words because that might alarm people.” Giridharadas comments that “she was being played back to herself…. When MarketWorld likes you, it wants you as a product” (Winners Take All, pp. 106-7).
Training to Run the World
One of the interviewees in Winners Take All, who became somewhat disillusioned in her job at McKinsey, explained that she had been “awed by the claim that people trained in business would gain some elusive way of thinking that was vital to helping people.” She said of the pitch they made to prospective recruits, “it was possible to come away from the information session thinking that if hired, you would spend most of your time helping Haiti with post-earthquake development and advising the Vatican.”
Winners Take All describes how the consultants are trained at McKinsey to be “experts” in businesses they knew nothing about. In the vernacular of the McKinsey generic “protocols” they would break down the problem into smaller and smaller component elements and then gather data to make the “presentation” and solve the problem. The “protocols” generated a lot of confidence. As one McKinsey consultant explained to Giridharadas, “the protocols more generally was being urged to spit out a preternaturally confident answer to something he knew nothing about” (Winners Take All, p. 137)
Gospel of Wealth
Giridharadas points out that big, organized philanthropy still follows the “wealth gospel” elaborated in writing and practice by gilded age robber baron, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie claimed that the role of the capitalist was to make as much profit as possible by any and all means. Then, after the wealth was accumulated, he said it was the responsibility of the capitalist to give some back to the community. So in 1892 while he was conducting one of the bloodiest and most vicious union-busting operations in U.S. history with his steel plant manager, Henry Frick (of the eponymous Museum), in Homestead, Pennsylvania, he was funding libraries and parks and schools.
At Homestead, Frick locked out the union when workers refused to accept longer hours. The union led a solid strike, and took over the company town. When Frick brought in hundreds of Pinkerton gun thugs, strikers fought them off in an all-day gun battle until the Pinkertons surrendered. Eleven strikers and nine Pinkertons died (from History.com). Then Carnegie had the state bring in the militia to defeat the strike. Firing and jailing the strikers, he reopened the steel plant with scabs allowing him to reduce wages and extend hours. Then he “gave away” some more money to build libraries with his name on them. This was the way things were supposed to work according to Carnegie.
The capitalist system, Carnegie explained, inevitably produces inequality. He was certainly correct about that, but the old robber baron argued that inequality would only be temporary until the capitalists’ generosity covered over the wounds it had caused with generous philanthropy. That split between how the money is made and at what cost is still at the heart of philanthropic ideology. The inequality caused by capitalism is not temporary.
Chicago humorist Finley Peter Dunn’s loquacious fictional Irish bartender, Mr. Dooley pointed out in a column about Carnegie that “There’s no such thing as a free library”:
“You don’t find [Carnegie] putting on false whiskers and turning up his coat collar when he goes out to be benevolent. No sir. Every time he drops a dollar it makes a noise like a waiter falling down stairs with a tray of dishes.”
“Him that giveth to the poor, they say, lendeth to the Lord. But in these days we look for quick returns on our investments. I like Andrew Carnegie… No beggar is ever turned empty-handed from the door. The panhandler knocks and asks for a glass of milk and a roll. ‘No, sir,’ says Andrew Carnegie. ‘I will not pauperize this unworthy man. Nothing is worse for a beggar man than to make a pauper out of him. Yet it shall not be said of me that I give nothing to the poor. Sanders, give him a library, and if he still insists on a roll tell him to roll the library.”–Finley Peter Dunne, “The Carnegie Libraries” (1906)One of Giridharadas’s philanthropic heroes is Darren Walker, African American head of the Ford Foundation who has tried to amend Carnegie’s “wealth gospel” with a “new gospel” that includes the idea of inequality—not only doing good, but also not doing so much harm. Giridharadas talks to him in a limo ride and follows him to a presentation at the private equity firm KKR where Walker couched his point about inequality in the in the language of opportunity.
Making the World a Worse Place
Giridharadas interviewed Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School who is one of the worriers. He is widely regarded as the godfather of corporate strategy. With co-author Mark Kramer, he penned an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2011 that caused a stir in MarketWorld. “The capitalist system is under siege,” they wrote. With Pogo-like revelation, Porter declared that the problem is “us.” Companies had become too focused on profits and didn’t consider the communities of which they were a part, he said. Porter offered the impossible alternative of “shared value.” Giridharadas met him in the Waldorf Astoria:
“Porter spoke of how companies over the last generation pursued a vision of globalization in which they owed nothing to any community. This was simply because those taught by professors like him at places like Harvard Business School, groomed by consulting and Wall Street and other training grounds tended to be agnostic about place.” –Winners Take All, p. 146Not so simple. Global profit-seeking is the fundamental logic of capitalism. The idea that capitalism can climb out of the hole of its political crisis through a doctrine of “shared value” and the discovery of “good nationalism” of place is an ideological talking point. Porter is part of a growing trend among academic liberal ideologues post-2008 to advance the idea that the mistake of globalists and “neoliberalism” was failure to recognize and embrace the nationalist sentiments of those “left behind.”
Giridharadas freely acknowledges that he is a participant as well as a critic of MarketWorld. An Aspen fellow, serial TED talker, and former McKinsey analyst he is a less fabulously wealthy guilty liberal talking to other guilty liberals. He sees the MarketWorld project as fundamentally anti-democratic. So he tries to shift the focus of his wealthy friends’ energies from private to public, from economics to politics, from market solutions to government solutions. But what kind of government can even begin to address the world’s most serious problems? One of the critics of big philanthropy he talks to compares the work of MarketWorld to slave-owners who justified the institution because they claimed to be benign. In that analogy Giridharadas himself is akin to the advocates of the “moral suasion” approach to abolition that hoped to end slavery by appealing to the slave owners’ sense of decency.
Capitalism can’t resolve any of the great systemic problems facing humanity: deepening social/economic inequality and global poverty, environmental catastrophe that is altering the evolutionary dynamics of life itself, endless war, and racism. All of these problems require internationalist solutions. But in the absence of revolutionary leadership and mass revolutionary parties, we have seen instead an explosion of mainly right-wing populism in advanced countries and growing reactionary nationalism worldwide.
Giridharadas writes about the need to look beyond the small “fixes” of the MarketWorld to the big systems at the root of the problems, but he never quite indicts capitalism as that system or offers an alternative. For Giridharadas the problem reduces to private vs. public. “Public” is the government. But what kind of government can solve the most urgent existential problems facing humanity? The capitalist government is filled to the brim with the same business consultants; it operates by the same demands and logic of MarketWorld and uses their language. So Obama preferred McKinsey to Goldman Sachs, but any capitalist government is the executive committee of the historically-developed capitalist state—materially, the armed bodies of men that protect private property and the system of profit-making through exploitation.
Giridharadas, like most liberals seeks a kinder, reformed, less nakedly cruel capitalism. But capitalism in its terminal decline cannot be reformed to solve the problems it has created. So the MarketWorlders have changed the world. They have made it worse. It will take a revolutionary workers government to expropriate the expropriators and freeing the wealth and resources so they may be used, together with a qualitative expansion of sustainable production, to create a rationally planned, international socialist economy that can put humanity on the path to human liberation. ■
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.