Communism is Coming to America! Run for Your Lives!!!
Neoliberal/Capitalism is a Hell of a Drug...
Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee Ownership of the Businesses They Work at
Two common-sense pieces of federal support for employee business ownership on the table.
The best-kept business model secret of our age is about to get the spotlight it has long deserved. It's employee ownership-a proven, common-sense pathway to reduce inequality, anchor jobs at home, and rebuild a strong and stable economy, using a vehicle that’s as American as apple pie: making entrepreneurs out of regular, working folks.
Two progressive champions-Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)-are teaming up to put their weight behind a pair of federal bills to make employee ownership more accessible. And-believe it or not-this is a policy idea that might actually have a chance, since prominent Republicans like Ronald Reagan have long favored employee ownership, which leverages firm structure, rather than social programs, to improve family economic outcomes. In an era of hunger for solutions to inequality, this may be an idea whose time has finally come.
Employee ownership works: for the workers who get a direct share in the economy, for the companies whose performance is demonstrably improved by a workforce invested in their jobs, and for the communities that need jobs anchored locally, in America, and not racing around the globe chasing the lowest wages. And crucially, it’s a strategy for greater equality and shared prosperity with a proven track record: there are more than ten million employee owners in the United States today who work and own a stake in companies like Publix Supermarkets, Wawa Convenience Stores, or New Belgium Brewing. And while there are a wide range of social enterprise approaches being piloted in communities across the United States, none can match employee ownership for proven, scalable impact, with models that are nationally-vetted and that have been successfully deployed for decades.
The two bills introduced today by Sanders-the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act and the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act-are critically important tools in the effort to scale employee ownership in the U.S.. (The initial research we carried out here at The Democracy Collaborative, through our Fifty by Fifty Initiative, a collaborative partnership between leading employee ownership advocates like the National Center for Employee Ownership, the Democracy at Work Institute, the ICA Group, and Certified Employee-Owned, has suggested that a target of fifty million employee owners in the US workforce by 2050-or roughly 25% of the projected future workforce-is an attainable goal, if key barriers are addressed.)
Historically, adoption of employee ownership in the U.S. has been largely driven by powerful tax incentives, primarily at the federal level, that assist owners who want to sell their business to their employees and provide a range of game-changing tax deductions to companies operating under various employee ownership structures-like Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and worker cooperatives.
The two new bills introduced in the Senate would further incentivize uptake of this key strategy for broadening access to business ownership. First, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act would establish an important source of public financing to help founders who want to sell their company to the employees who helped them build it. By providing loan guarantees or subordinated debt to help employees buy their workplaces-particularly when the owners try to move their jobs overseas-this legislation doesn’t assume that the government can do everything, but instead encourages the creation of a smarter, more sustainable, and more cost effective public-private ecosystem of financial support for transitions to employee ownership. Such ecosystems of support for broad-based ownership are critical, as we highlighted in our report Strategies For Financing the Inclusive Economy.
The second bill, the WORK Act, is another key piece of the puzzle. All the tax breaks and financing options in the world won’t create a single employee-owned company if no one is aware of the option or doesn’t have the technical capacity to make the transition happen. Indeed, our Fifty by Fifty research found that lack of awareness is one of the critical factors preventing employee ownership from scaling to its full potential. The Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act addresses this barrier head on, making grants available to local entities doing the necessary work of employee ownership education and training. We profiled one of the leading examples of this approach, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, in our report Educate and Empower: Tools For Building Community Wealth-and found that this kind of education paired with technical assistance is not only incredibly effective but also highly cost-efficient.
Over the course of three decades, OEOC has helped over 90 companies convert to employee ownership, creating 15,000 employee-owners at an estimated cost of just $772 a job. The recent success of a similar, smaller-scale initiative in NYC shows that this kind of public support for technical assistance is even more essential for worker cooperative development, employee-owned startups, and employee buyouts of smaller shops. While larger, more established businesses can access the necessary financing and absorb the transaction costs of an ownership transition, launching new employee owned businesses or transitioning mom and pop shops to worker ownership requires a more robust ecosystem of technical support.
Here at the Democracy Collaborative, we’ve recognized with many others the incredible threat presented by the "silver tsunami": as the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, too many of the businesses they own lack a succession plan. Without plans for ownership transitions, businesses shutter, workers lose their jobs, and communities suffer. But Federal support for employee ownership can help turn this looming threat into an incredible opportunity to rebuild a strong U.S. economy where all can prosper. A U.S. economy anchored in widespread employee ownership would represent a fundamentally different kind of economy, in which millions more families enjoy greater financial stability, increased income, and greater retirement security.
Moreover, in times when Washington is unlikely to agree on much, employee ownership’s proven track and record and demonstrated bipartisan appeal offers a chance to build towards a stronger and more just economy when many other avenues of transformative reform may prove blocked.
Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee Ownership of the Businesses They Work at
Amid “Constitutional Crisis,” Bernie Sanders Urges Workers To Seize Means of Production
The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, politically speaking. Most of it has to do with the onslaught of chaos that followed Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey-a move political scientists agree is off the spectrum of normalcy in the history of the American presidency. Before his termination, Comey was leading an investigation into the Trump team’s alleged ties to the Russian government. Keith Ellison, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has said “we are witnessing a constitutional crisis.” Calls for impeachment are in the air, along with a good deal of conspiracy theorizing.
In sum, the republic as we know it may be its closest yet to tatters. Enter: Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and the country’s most popular politician. He-alongside Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy, from Vermont, Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, and Maggie Hassan, from New Hampshire-is encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.
This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy theory, but the intended result of two bills introduced to relatively little fanfare Thursday. The first, the WORK (“Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge”) Act, would direct more than $45 million in funding to state-level employee ownership centers, aimed at providing training and technical assistance to current and prospective worker-owners. A second piece of legislation would establish something called the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank, via $500 million in funds for low-interest rate loans and financial assistance for workers who want to buy out the businesses where they work and either incorporate them as worker-owned cooperatives or establish employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), which give workers an ownership stake in their company.
“By expanding employee ownership and participation, we can create stronger companies in Vermont and throughout this country, prevent job losses and improve working conditions for struggling employees,” Sanders said in a statement. “Simply put, when employees have an ownership stake in their company, they will not ship their own jobs to China to increase their profits, they will be more productive, and they will earn a better living.”
Notably, a provision outlined in the second bill would give employees the first crack at taking over their workplace if owners move to offshore their jobs, according to John Duda.
Duda works for the Democracy Collaborative, a research institute that supports cooperative development. He also helped found the worker-owned cafe and bookstore Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Maryland.
“I think it would be a game changer both in terms of accelerating worker-ownership, and discouraging companies from pursuing a race to the bottom in terms of looking for cheaper wages overseas,” Duda said about the legislation.
Cooperative ownership has a long history in the United States, Duda explains. The earliest champions of organized labor in America pushed for cooperatives as a means to shore up employee control over the workplace. As a document officially adopted by the Knights of Labor in 1878 put it, “The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth ... render it imperative ... that a check should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation, and a system adopted which will secure to the laborer the fruits of his toil.” Later, New Deal initiatives like the Rural Electrification Administration provided start-up funds for people in rural areas to create cooperatives, with rural electric cooperatives now meeting 11 percent of the country’s demand for electricity. Civil rights leaders from Ella Baker to Fannie Lou Hamer would also cut their teeth in cooperative self-help programs.
Today, companies from Cabot Creamery to REI are cooperatives of one form or another. And Publix Super Markets and Wawa convenience stores are just two of many major firms in the United States that offer their employees ESOPs. Worker-owned cooperatives, by contrast-governed by the principle of “one worker, one vote”-tend to be smaller in the United States than either ESOPs or producer and consumer cooperatives, but more widespread throughout South America and Europe. In contrast to the estimated 10.3 million Americans covered by ESOPs, just over 5,000 people are a part of worker-owned cooperatives.
Sanders himself is no stranger to cooperatives. He’s introduced similar bills before, and the legislation is partially inspired by the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, or VEOC, of which Sanders has been a longtime booster. Speaking to a forum on workers’ ownership at Burlington City Hall in 1985, then-Mayor Sanders said, “Democracy cannot just mean the opportunity to vote for a Walter Mondale or a Ronald Reagan once every four years ... If we have a vision as to what democracy is about, it’s got to mean the right of a working person to control his or her job, to have some say about what’s being produced, to sit down with the other workers and say, ‘This is what I think we should do.’” (You can watch the full clip here.)
One of the other models for the kind of support programs outlined in the WORK Act emerged out of the closure of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory in 1977-a siren song for the kind of deindustrialization that would plague the Rust Belt for years to come. Workers, Duda said, attempted to seize the plant and run it cooperatively in the run-up to the closure. The effort ultimately failed, but captured the attention of Ohioans interested in developing cooperative businesses. Started in 1987, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) has since helped some 90 companies to become employee-owned, creating an estimated 15,000 employee-owners in the Buckeye State. A like-minded push in New York City has seen some initial success after an investment of $1.2 million in worker cooperative business development efforts in 2014.
“It’s hard stuff getting all the legal ducks in a row, getting all the financing lined up, figuring out how to take advantage of the tax incentives that exist. Having technical assistance and having grant support for technical assistance is incredibly key,” Duda said.
He wasn’t overly optimistic about the bills’ chances in Congress, but thought their introduction represented a step forward in terms of bringing cooperatives further into America’s economic mainstream.
“We have a lot of drama going on, and it’s vitally important to pay attention to,” Duda told In These Times, “but we need to not forget that we are seeing historic levels of inequality. We need to be thinking about solutions and a transition to a broader-based ownership of the economy that allows us to tackle that question. We may not be able to pass this legislation today, but there’s going to be a time at which policymaking is possible again and we need to be ready.”
Amid “Constitutional Crisis,” Bernie Sanders Urges Workers To Seize Means of Production
Zanon: Under Worker Control Since 2001
Interview with Raúl Godoy, Zanon worker and national leader of the PTS. Godoy was the first General Secretary of the Sindicato de Obreros y Empleados Ceramistas de Neuquén (SOECN - Ceramic Workers’ Union of Neuquén) after the union was reclaimed from the bureaucracy. This interview occurred at the time of the ten year anniversary of the occupation under workers’ control of the Zanon ceramics factory.
Left Voice’s second issue, "Women on the Front Lines", is now available to purchase. For every magazine sold, we will donate a dollar to a worker controlled factory in Argentina.
October 1st 2011 marked ten years of the occupation of the Zanon factory, which began in the midst of a financial crisis. What significance does this hold today?
Godoy: The fight at Zanon was a class-struggle response to the capitalist crisis in Argentina, which in those years saw the closure of almost 2000 factories.
The first response came from the organizations of unemployed workers, but then came the first factory occupations against closures and layoffs. These not only put private property into question, but also demonstrated that capitalists were not needed. The idea that “we can produce without the bosses” was repeated in different parts of the country.
Our experience shows, on a small scale, that workers are capable of providing a working-class and peoples’ solution to business closures, lockouts and unemployment. One that makes the capitalists pay for the crisis.
Over the next few weeks we will not only recall those days in which we decided to occupy the plant. We also want our struggle to serve and help many workers to prepare for the future.
And what were the main parts of this process?
The first thing we did was reclaim the comision interna (shop / factory committee) from the bureaucracy of the Montes brothers, who sold themselves to the company. We proposed some basic objectives: that all decisions would be made by asamblea (assembly / mass meeting), that all delegates would be recallable, and that the rights of both permanently employed workers and contractors would be defended equally. The unity of the workers’ ranks was one of our first lines of struggle. In this way we went to work, side by side, with a group of compañeros (comrades), from the first conflicts up until the struggle against the Zanon family’s organized evacuation of the plant, which ended with the closure of the factory.
We had a very important strike, which became a symbol of our struggle, back in 2000 when our compañero Daniel Ferrás died as a result of the poor health and safety conditions at the factory. Another milestone was our reclaiming of the union for the workers, which occurred at an historic assembly in Cutral Có in Neuquén province where we prevented the Montes bureaucracy from imposing a fraudulent junta electoral (electoral board). It was here that we won control of the union; after this, the vote was a formality because the majority of the workers already supported us. Another very important milestone was the 34 day strike in 2001. At this time we stressed to our compañeros that we would have to fight hard if we wanted to keep our jobs. “Open the accounting books that shows the millions that they have earned in previous years” was the call, and we went forward with this big strike.
Then came the occupation, five months of tents, which saw displays of enormous working-class militancy that were later put into the running of the factory. With the objective of workers’ administration, we organized production, created different sectors and commissions for marketing, purchasing, sales, health, safety, press and broadcasting, all with sector coordinators, and a leadership body that discussed the politics of economic management as well as where our struggle was heading. This was a genuine Workers’ Council: the “coordinators’ meeting”. It was a new experience for us and for thousands of workers that followed us, a school of planning that demonstrated the capacity of the working class to manage the factories.
And workers’ self-management at Zanon, in contrast to other experiences, knew it had to surround itself from the beginning with enormous support not only from other workers, but from the community. We received support from our Mapuche brothers and sisters (the original indigenous peoples of Patagonia), together with human rights groups, artists, even the prisoners in Unit 11, the prison near Zanon, who showed their solidarity by donating several days of food rations to us.
We joined with thousands of the unemployed who were fighting for real work and with students defending public education. This popularised the slogan “Zanon belongs to the people, support these workers”, which was raised by thousands of workers who saw Zanon as an example of a response to the crisis.
From the beginning we incorporated the demands of different sectors. We also raised another banner: “for a plan of public works, one that generates real jobs, housing, schools and hospitals”; all very pressing demands for a population that suffers a housing and infrastructure crisis, a crisis that leads to people’s poorly-built little houses burning down in the harsh Neuquén winters, while millions in royalties flow to the oil companies.
With the students and teachers, we jointly raised the demand for “free and secular public education” that subsequently led to the signing of a worker-university pact between our Ceramic Workers’ Union and the University of Comahue.
Our work in common with other workers’ organizations, in the face of eviction, the bureaucracy and the government, led us to promote a common organization, the Regional Coordinadora (Coordinating Committee) of Alto Valle. Workers from the factories, the public sector, health, teachers, along with organizations of the unemployed, students and the left-wing parties all came together there. It was a very important organization in Neuquén that allowed us to coordinate our actions, to organize solidarity with large actions - such as that on 8 April 2003 when the Asociación de Trabajadores de la Educación de Neuquén (ATEN - Education Workers’ Association of Neuquén) struck in support of the workers of Zanon - and to have a body for debate among workers opposed to the bureaucracy.
That experience, although it was not extended over time, was very profound. It showed us the kind of organizations of workers’ self-determination we need to organize in moments of crisis, such as that crisis we lived through in those years, and that will come to life in other parts of the world.
All of the work we undertook to unite with other working-class and popular sectors and win the community support that we counted on in those years shows, on a small scale, the potential power of the working class to lead an alliance of all sectors that suffer exploitation and oppression in this society. This alliance that can take on and defeat the capitalists. This allowed us to deal with any eviction attempt and now the attempt to economically suffocate us, which has been pushed forward by the government of the MPN (Movimiento Popular Neuquino - the governing party in the province) with the collaboration of the national government, who are both enemies of workers’ self-management.
Along with workers’ self-management, the Ceramic Workers’ Union played a fundamental role . . .
Absolutely. In the year 2000, as many know, we threw out the Montes bureaucracy. The Agrupación Marrón (Brown Group) of the SOECN, organized on the basis of a class-struggle program, was put to the test in each of these events that occurred in the province. And not only in Neuquén. We began to approach each place where there was a struggle: Mosconi in Salta, Brukman (a textile factory in Buenos Aires occupied by its workers in 2001), the oil workers, the popular assemblies, the Subte (Subterráneo - Buenos Aires Underground). We organized meetings of factories, participated in the piquetero assemblies, launched a newspaper called Nuestra Lucha (Our Struggle), everything that allowed us to unite with those sectors that were fighting against the bureaucracy and the bosses, these were our brothers and sisters. Then we proposed and launched various forms of coordination.
And amongst the ceramic workers we set ourselves the objective of revolutionizing the union. Many militant compañeros have reclaimed their organizations, but they do not fight to get rid of the bureaucratic heritage that remains. Many pass through a union, but after they lose it, everything remains the same.
For this reason, and after much discussion, debate and participation we approved the new statutes of the union: that the assembly is sovereign, that all leaders are recallable and that their positions be rotated; that minorities have representation; that the union is a class-struggle union and is therefore independent of the state, the employers and big business parties, and that it places itself at the service of the class struggle which extends beyond national borders. This is part of the program of the revolutionaries: the struggle against state control of the unions and for workers’ democracy. And we don’t stop there: we cannot simply fight - even if at times in a heroic and self-sacrificing fashion - for only purely trade-union claims. We set ourselves the most fundamental goal, the political perspective of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.
The last step, a very important one, that we took with the compañeros of the Agrupación Marrón, was the winning of a seat, a working-class and socialist seat, in the Neuquén Legislature (provincial parliament). It has the characteristic of having won a frontline position within enemy territory, but “with banner unfurled.” We maintain cohesion and have been making the same arguments for all these years. Since 2003 a group of leaders have considered the need to make a leap from the union to the political, and we were pushing for the formation of a political tool for workers. In these elections, the constitution of the Left Front at the national level between the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS - Socialist Workers Party), the Partido Obrero (PO-Workers’ Party) and Izquierda Socialista (IS - Socialist Left) aroused a lot of enthusiasm among many workers. So we held open plenaries of the Agrupación Marrón Ceramista from the four factories, that link us together with independent compañeros, and we jointly decided to be a part of the Front in Neuquén, and to vote for Alejandro López and I to head the list of deputies. Other compañeros were added to the different lists of the Front within Neuquén. We also face the prosecution of the Kirchnerist government against the left and militant workers and now we continue to fight for the acquittal of all the workers’ and peoples’ fighters, of which there are five thousand across the country and over five hundred in the province, including many ceramic workers, among them Alejandro and myself.
Zanon: Under Worker Control Since 2001
Neoliberal psychology
Why do we allow the logic of the market to occupy our minds?
All too often, critics speak of neoliberalism as a coercive, external force lying somewhere ‘out there’ in the political landscape. But many of us increasingly and voluntarily govern our lives in a manner mirroring the logic of the market. Is it any wonder, then, that this ideology has become so naturalised, and the alternatives so hard to see?
Neoliberalism is an elusive term, typically used to describe such processes as privatisation, deregulation, the cutting back of social and welfare provision, the retraction of the state, and the idealisation of free-markets: ideas thought to have been born in the minds of scholars in Paris in the 1930s before they emerged as a political reality in the 1970s.
But this definition ignores the fact that this movement has dug its ideological roots deep inside each one of us. Neoliberal rationalities are both political and psychological, serving to create a utopian free-market order with the power of the state and to extend this logic to every corner of society. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant puts it, neoliberalism represents an “articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third.”
Early neoliberal theorizing recognised that creating an environment that cultivates Darwinian-like competition actually requires a far broader set of rules. Thus, a key aspect of neoliberalism is not so much the rolling-back of regulation, but the type of society the rolling-out of state power is designed to uphold: striving to preserve whatever unequal distributions of talent and capabilities we are born with and whatever good or bad luck happens upon us through the chaos of life; frantically trying to fabricate an illusion of a level playing field; and disciplining those that break the rules or don’t even want to play.
But neoliberal theory didn’t only reject the earlier economic liberals’ belief that competitive free-markets emerge in a spontaneous natural order; it also extended this logic to the personal level, to the citizen, concluding that the rational, self-interested individual at the heart of neoclassical economics doesn’t ‘naturally’ emerge either. This gave rise to an even more active and insidious project to cultivate citizens who seek to compete in every aspect of their lives, chillingly captured by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 with her infamous statement: “Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
This model of neoliberal citizenship has received wide-ranging attention from sociologists and political scientists to psychoanalysts and anthropologists. Michel Foucault conceived this new homo economicus as an entrepreneur of himself, shifting the liberal vision of people owning themselves as if they were a piece of property to a neoliberal vision of people owning themselves as if they were a business.
As property, people become devoid of notions such as duty, compassion and solidarity. They gain an artificial sense of separation from other people and from the ecology that supports all life, and seek fulfilment in increased wealth and consumption-a way of living that Aristotle and Siddhartha (the Buddha) would have dismissed thousands of years ago as thoroughly as any modern critic.
But within Neoliberalism there’s a shift: the world is no longer perceived simply as property to be consumed, but as an opportunity to be captured in order to increase returns to financial, social or human capital-a trickle down of capitalist rationality without a trickle down of wealth.
As a result, people become not only separated from each other and ‘nature’ in space, but also projected in time in a process of constant self-improvement, self-investment and the efficient application of one’s bundle-of-skills to maximize future returns. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean commodification, which is essential for capitalism's survival, but also the economisation of areas of human society in which no formal commodities are found. Thus, traditional non-market social norms are displaced by the cold-hearted, means-ends calculus of efficiency, investment, productivity, growth, costs and benefits, and calculated exchange-and along the way the quest for happiness is inverted: want to get rich? Get happy first.
What was once merely theory is now widely practiced. The neoliberal vision of the citizen was first made explicit in the abstract idea of human capital, but now it’s exemplified in more concrete ways every time volunteering in Africa is construed as a great thing to have on your CV; or when nine out of ten arguments for fighting patriarchy in the boardroom are appeals to efficiency; or where morning raves are promoted for their ability to improve productivity at work; or when the first thing on a list of 21 reasons to have sex is looking younger. Neoliberal rationality has become stunningly efficient at reproducing itself.
We can use Google Ngrams to visualise how this collective psychology has swept through society by tracking the frequency with which different words and phrases have been used in English-language books since the 19th century. By carefully selecting words and phrases that we encounter on a daily basis and which embody the spirit of neoliberal rationality, we find some fascinating patterns emerging near the beginning of the 1970s.
For example, there has been an explosion in usage of the phrase ‘sell yourself’-an unsettling sign of the way in which we have learnt to speak of ourselves in the language of the market. Now, we’re even encouraged to sell ourselves on our first dates. It’s as if we have abolished slavery only to replace it with a system of entirely voluntary self-commodification. Aside from the relatively chilled-out decade of the 1960s, time has also become a commodity that we buy, and in which we invest.
Politicians and policy makers make endless attempts to align self-interest with more desirable social or environmental outcomes (rather than appealing to collective responsibilities), a shift that’s manifested in the rapidly-expanding discourse around incentives. And the increasing usage of phrases like ‘it’s none of your (or my) business’ in contexts in which nothing is actually bought or sold shows how the idea of managing life as an entrepreneur has taken hold. Even in fervently anti-neoliberal writings we hear such phrases as ‘bang on the money’ applied to ideas about social justice.
Despite the tendency to see so much of personal, social and economic life as a calculated investment for future returns, contemporary societies don’t appear to have significantly increased their capabilities for solving their long-term problems. Threats such as climate change, exhausted food production systems and water supplies, antibiotic resistance, economic collapse, and the arms race remain mostly un-mitigated. So why do we still fail to react properly to such threats?
It appears that our lives have become almost permanently projected into a place lying somewhere between the present and the future. Our hopes, dreams, and quests for a meaningful existence are cast into a space in time that never actually arrives. It’s as if we’ve fabricated a kind-of secular afterlife-an imaginary destination that justifies the struggles of the present-although, unlike religious afterlives, this is one that we have to believe we’ll reach before our deaths.
These psychological impacts also seem deeply problematic in themselves. By cultivating the antithesis of a mindful, grounded way of living, it’s no wonder that we now hear talk of epidemics of depression, demoralisation, narcissism and other psychological disorders. But perhaps such issues have been breeding for far longer than the word ‘epidemic’ implies. Authors like Charles Eisenstein argue that a process of separation between people and nature began with the development of agriculture thousands of years ago, developing via the separation of the Gods from within nature to become forces of nature themselves, extending into the notion of human dominance over the natural world, and culminating in the neoliberal idea that we are not only separate from nature and each other but from our present selves.
Today, there does at least appear to be a growing recognition of the need to counter these trends, as evidenced by the surge of interest in mindfulness and meditation, which are becoming increasingly demystified by a growing body of scientific research. Predictably, the response of capitalism has been to appropriate these practices and direct them towards productivity and profits, nicely captured by Google’s ‘head of mindfulness training’ in a brand new neoliberal aphorism: “mindfulness opens the doorway to loving kindness, which is at the heart of business success.”
But the contradiction between the projected, atomised self of neoliberalism and the grounded egolessness of mindfulness is glaring. Business managers may believe that investing time in meditation will “pay dividends” in the form of increased employee productivity and reduced healthcare costs, but could a truly mindful consumer or investment banker ever exist? Perhaps such cultural appropriations will prove fatal to the psychological basis of neoliberal capitalism itself.
Neoliberal psychology
Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee Ownership of the Businesses They Work at
Two common-sense pieces of federal support for employee business ownership on the table.
The best-kept business model secret of our age is about to get the spotlight it has long deserved. It's employee ownership-a proven, common-sense pathway to reduce inequality, anchor jobs at home, and rebuild a strong and stable economy, using a vehicle that’s as American as apple pie: making entrepreneurs out of regular, working folks.
Two progressive champions-Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)-are teaming up to put their weight behind a pair of federal bills to make employee ownership more accessible. And-believe it or not-this is a policy idea that might actually have a chance, since prominent Republicans like Ronald Reagan have long favored employee ownership, which leverages firm structure, rather than social programs, to improve family economic outcomes. In an era of hunger for solutions to inequality, this may be an idea whose time has finally come.
Employee ownership works: for the workers who get a direct share in the economy, for the companies whose performance is demonstrably improved by a workforce invested in their jobs, and for the communities that need jobs anchored locally, in America, and not racing around the globe chasing the lowest wages. And crucially, it’s a strategy for greater equality and shared prosperity with a proven track record: there are more than ten million employee owners in the United States today who work and own a stake in companies like Publix Supermarkets, Wawa Convenience Stores, or New Belgium Brewing. And while there are a wide range of social enterprise approaches being piloted in communities across the United States, none can match employee ownership for proven, scalable impact, with models that are nationally-vetted and that have been successfully deployed for decades.
The two bills introduced today by Sanders-the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act and the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act-are critically important tools in the effort to scale employee ownership in the U.S.. (The initial research we carried out here at The Democracy Collaborative, through our Fifty by Fifty Initiative, a collaborative partnership between leading employee ownership advocates like the National Center for Employee Ownership, the Democracy at Work Institute, the ICA Group, and Certified Employee-Owned, has suggested that a target of fifty million employee owners in the US workforce by 2050-or roughly 25% of the projected future workforce-is an attainable goal, if key barriers are addressed.)
Historically, adoption of employee ownership in the U.S. has been largely driven by powerful tax incentives, primarily at the federal level, that assist owners who want to sell their business to their employees and provide a range of game-changing tax deductions to companies operating under various employee ownership structures-like Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and worker cooperatives.
The two new bills introduced in the Senate would further incentivize uptake of this key strategy for broadening access to business ownership. First, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act would establish an important source of public financing to help founders who want to sell their company to the employees who helped them build it. By providing loan guarantees or subordinated debt to help employees buy their workplaces-particularly when the owners try to move their jobs overseas-this legislation doesn’t assume that the government can do everything, but instead encourages the creation of a smarter, more sustainable, and more cost effective public-private ecosystem of financial support for transitions to employee ownership. Such ecosystems of support for broad-based ownership are critical, as we highlighted in our report Strategies For Financing the Inclusive Economy.
The second bill, the WORK Act, is another key piece of the puzzle. All the tax breaks and financing options in the world won’t create a single employee-owned company if no one is aware of the option or doesn’t have the technical capacity to make the transition happen. Indeed, our Fifty by Fifty research found that lack of awareness is one of the critical factors preventing employee ownership from scaling to its full potential. The Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act addresses this barrier head on, making grants available to local entities doing the necessary work of employee ownership education and training. We profiled one of the leading examples of this approach, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, in our report Educate and Empower: Tools For Building Community Wealth-and found that this kind of education paired with technical assistance is not only incredibly effective but also highly cost-efficient.
Over the course of three decades, OEOC has helped over 90 companies convert to employee ownership, creating 15,000 employee-owners at an estimated cost of just $772 a job. The recent success of a similar, smaller-scale initiative in NYC shows that this kind of public support for technical assistance is even more essential for worker cooperative development, employee-owned startups, and employee buyouts of smaller shops. While larger, more established businesses can access the necessary financing and absorb the transaction costs of an ownership transition, launching new employee owned businesses or transitioning mom and pop shops to worker ownership requires a more robust ecosystem of technical support.
Here at the Democracy Collaborative, we’ve recognized with many others the incredible threat presented by the "silver tsunami": as the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, too many of the businesses they own lack a succession plan. Without plans for ownership transitions, businesses shutter, workers lose their jobs, and communities suffer. But Federal support for employee ownership can help turn this looming threat into an incredible opportunity to rebuild a strong U.S. economy where all can prosper. A U.S. economy anchored in widespread employee ownership would represent a fundamentally different kind of economy, in which millions more families enjoy greater financial stability, increased income, and greater retirement security.
Moreover, in times when Washington is unlikely to agree on much, employee ownership’s proven track and record and demonstrated bipartisan appeal offers a chance to build towards a stronger and more just economy when many other avenues of transformative reform may prove blocked.
Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee Ownership of the Businesses They Work at
Amid “Constitutional Crisis,” Bernie Sanders Urges Workers To Seize Means of Production
The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind, politically speaking. Most of it has to do with the onslaught of chaos that followed Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey-a move political scientists agree is off the spectrum of normalcy in the history of the American presidency. Before his termination, Comey was leading an investigation into the Trump team’s alleged ties to the Russian government. Keith Ellison, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has said “we are witnessing a constitutional crisis.” Calls for impeachment are in the air, along with a good deal of conspiracy theorizing.
In sum, the republic as we know it may be its closest yet to tatters. Enter: Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and the country’s most popular politician. He-alongside Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy, from Vermont, Kirsten Gillibrand, from New York, and Maggie Hassan, from New Hampshire-is encouraging workers to take control of the means of production.
This isn’t some right-wing conspiracy theory, but the intended result of two bills introduced to relatively little fanfare Thursday. The first, the WORK (“Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge”) Act, would direct more than $45 million in funding to state-level employee ownership centers, aimed at providing training and technical assistance to current and prospective worker-owners. A second piece of legislation would establish something called the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank, via $500 million in funds for low-interest rate loans and financial assistance for workers who want to buy out the businesses where they work and either incorporate them as worker-owned cooperatives or establish employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), which give workers an ownership stake in their company.
“By expanding employee ownership and participation, we can create stronger companies in Vermont and throughout this country, prevent job losses and improve working conditions for struggling employees,” Sanders said in a statement. “Simply put, when employees have an ownership stake in their company, they will not ship their own jobs to China to increase their profits, they will be more productive, and they will earn a better living.”
Notably, a provision outlined in the second bill would give employees the first crack at taking over their workplace if owners move to offshore their jobs, according to John Duda.
Duda works for the Democracy Collaborative, a research institute that supports cooperative development. He also helped found the worker-owned cafe and bookstore Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Maryland.
“I think it would be a game changer both in terms of accelerating worker-ownership, and discouraging companies from pursuing a race to the bottom in terms of looking for cheaper wages overseas,” Duda said about the legislation.
Cooperative ownership has a long history in the United States, Duda explains. The earliest champions of organized labor in America pushed for cooperatives as a means to shore up employee control over the workplace. As a document officially adopted by the Knights of Labor in 1878 put it, “The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated wealth ... render it imperative ... that a check should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation, and a system adopted which will secure to the laborer the fruits of his toil.” Later, New Deal initiatives like the Rural Electrification Administration provided start-up funds for people in rural areas to create cooperatives, with rural electric cooperatives now meeting 11 percent of the country’s demand for electricity. Civil rights leaders from Ella Baker to Fannie Lou Hamer would also cut their teeth in cooperative self-help programs.
Today, companies from Cabot Creamery to REI are cooperatives of one form or another. And Publix Super Markets and Wawa convenience stores are just two of many major firms in the United States that offer their employees ESOPs. Worker-owned cooperatives, by contrast-governed by the principle of “one worker, one vote”-tend to be smaller in the United States than either ESOPs or producer and consumer cooperatives, but more widespread throughout South America and Europe. In contrast to the estimated 10.3 million Americans covered by ESOPs, just over 5,000 people are a part of worker-owned cooperatives.
Sanders himself is no stranger to cooperatives. He’s introduced similar bills before, and the legislation is partially inspired by the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, or VEOC, of which Sanders has been a longtime booster. Speaking to a forum on workers’ ownership at Burlington City Hall in 1985, then-Mayor Sanders said, “Democracy cannot just mean the opportunity to vote for a Walter Mondale or a Ronald Reagan once every four years ... If we have a vision as to what democracy is about, it’s got to mean the right of a working person to control his or her job, to have some say about what’s being produced, to sit down with the other workers and say, ‘This is what I think we should do.’” (You can watch the full clip here.)
One of the other models for the kind of support programs outlined in the WORK Act emerged out of the closure of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory in 1977-a siren song for the kind of deindustrialization that would plague the Rust Belt for years to come. Workers, Duda said, attempted to seize the plant and run it cooperatively in the run-up to the closure. The effort ultimately failed, but captured the attention of Ohioans interested in developing cooperative businesses. Started in 1987, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) has since helped some 90 companies to become employee-owned, creating an estimated 15,000 employee-owners in the Buckeye State. A like-minded push in New York City has seen some initial success after an investment of $1.2 million in worker cooperative business development efforts in 2014.
“It’s hard stuff getting all the legal ducks in a row, getting all the financing lined up, figuring out how to take advantage of the tax incentives that exist. Having technical assistance and having grant support for technical assistance is incredibly key,” Duda said.
He wasn’t overly optimistic about the bills’ chances in Congress, but thought their introduction represented a step forward in terms of bringing cooperatives further into America’s economic mainstream.
“We have a lot of drama going on, and it’s vitally important to pay attention to,” Duda told In These Times, “but we need to not forget that we are seeing historic levels of inequality. We need to be thinking about solutions and a transition to a broader-based ownership of the economy that allows us to tackle that question. We may not be able to pass this legislation today, but there’s going to be a time at which policymaking is possible again and we need to be ready.”
Amid “Constitutional Crisis,” Bernie Sanders Urges Workers To Seize Means of Production
Zanon: Under Worker Control Since 2001
Interview with Raúl Godoy, Zanon worker and national leader of the PTS. Godoy was the first General Secretary of the Sindicato de Obreros y Empleados Ceramistas de Neuquén (SOECN - Ceramic Workers’ Union of Neuquén) after the union was reclaimed from the bureaucracy. This interview occurred at the time of the ten year anniversary of the occupation under workers’ control of the Zanon ceramics factory.
Left Voice’s second issue, "Women on the Front Lines", is now available to purchase. For every magazine sold, we will donate a dollar to a worker controlled factory in Argentina.
October 1st 2011 marked ten years of the occupation of the Zanon factory, which began in the midst of a financial crisis. What significance does this hold today?
Godoy: The fight at Zanon was a class-struggle response to the capitalist crisis in Argentina, which in those years saw the closure of almost 2000 factories.
The first response came from the organizations of unemployed workers, but then came the first factory occupations against closures and layoffs. These not only put private property into question, but also demonstrated that capitalists were not needed. The idea that “we can produce without the bosses” was repeated in different parts of the country.
Our experience shows, on a small scale, that workers are capable of providing a working-class and peoples’ solution to business closures, lockouts and unemployment. One that makes the capitalists pay for the crisis.
Over the next few weeks we will not only recall those days in which we decided to occupy the plant. We also want our struggle to serve and help many workers to prepare for the future.
And what were the main parts of this process?
The first thing we did was reclaim the comision interna (shop / factory committee) from the bureaucracy of the Montes brothers, who sold themselves to the company. We proposed some basic objectives: that all decisions would be made by asamblea (assembly / mass meeting), that all delegates would be recallable, and that the rights of both permanently employed workers and contractors would be defended equally. The unity of the workers’ ranks was one of our first lines of struggle. In this way we went to work, side by side, with a group of compañeros (comrades), from the first conflicts up until the struggle against the Zanon family’s organized evacuation of the plant, which ended with the closure of the factory.
We had a very important strike, which became a symbol of our struggle, back in 2000 when our compañero Daniel Ferrás died as a result of the poor health and safety conditions at the factory. Another milestone was our reclaiming of the union for the workers, which occurred at an historic assembly in Cutral Có in Neuquén province where we prevented the Montes bureaucracy from imposing a fraudulent junta electoral (electoral board). It was here that we won control of the union; after this, the vote was a formality because the majority of the workers already supported us. Another very important milestone was the 34 day strike in 2001. At this time we stressed to our compañeros that we would have to fight hard if we wanted to keep our jobs. “Open the accounting books that shows the millions that they have earned in previous years” was the call, and we went forward with this big strike.
Then came the occupation, five months of tents, which saw displays of enormous working-class militancy that were later put into the running of the factory. With the objective of workers’ administration, we organized production, created different sectors and commissions for marketing, purchasing, sales, health, safety, press and broadcasting, all with sector coordinators, and a leadership body that discussed the politics of economic management as well as where our struggle was heading. This was a genuine Workers’ Council: the “coordinators’ meeting”. It was a new experience for us and for thousands of workers that followed us, a school of planning that demonstrated the capacity of the working class to manage the factories.
And workers’ self-management at Zanon, in contrast to other experiences, knew it had to surround itself from the beginning with enormous support not only from other workers, but from the community. We received support from our Mapuche brothers and sisters (the original indigenous peoples of Patagonia), together with human rights groups, artists, even the prisoners in Unit 11, the prison near Zanon, who showed their solidarity by donating several days of food rations to us.
We joined with thousands of the unemployed who were fighting for real work and with students defending public education. This popularised the slogan “Zanon belongs to the people, support these workers”, which was raised by thousands of workers who saw Zanon as an example of a response to the crisis.
From the beginning we incorporated the demands of different sectors. We also raised another banner: “for a plan of public works, one that generates real jobs, housing, schools and hospitals”; all very pressing demands for a population that suffers a housing and infrastructure crisis, a crisis that leads to people’s poorly-built little houses burning down in the harsh Neuquén winters, while millions in royalties flow to the oil companies.
With the students and teachers, we jointly raised the demand for “free and secular public education” that subsequently led to the signing of a worker-university pact between our Ceramic Workers’ Union and the University of Comahue.
Our work in common with other workers’ organizations, in the face of eviction, the bureaucracy and the government, led us to promote a common organization, the Regional Coordinadora (Coordinating Committee) of Alto Valle. Workers from the factories, the public sector, health, teachers, along with organizations of the unemployed, students and the left-wing parties all came together there. It was a very important organization in Neuquén that allowed us to coordinate our actions, to organize solidarity with large actions - such as that on 8 April 2003 when the Asociación de Trabajadores de la Educación de Neuquén (ATEN - Education Workers’ Association of Neuquén) struck in support of the workers of Zanon - and to have a body for debate among workers opposed to the bureaucracy.
That experience, although it was not extended over time, was very profound. It showed us the kind of organizations of workers’ self-determination we need to organize in moments of crisis, such as that crisis we lived through in those years, and that will come to life in other parts of the world.
All of the work we undertook to unite with other working-class and popular sectors and win the community support that we counted on in those years shows, on a small scale, the potential power of the working class to lead an alliance of all sectors that suffer exploitation and oppression in this society. This alliance that can take on and defeat the capitalists. This allowed us to deal with any eviction attempt and now the attempt to economically suffocate us, which has been pushed forward by the government of the MPN (Movimiento Popular Neuquino - the governing party in the province) with the collaboration of the national government, who are both enemies of workers’ self-management.
Along with workers’ self-management, the Ceramic Workers’ Union played a fundamental role . . .
Absolutely. In the year 2000, as many know, we threw out the Montes bureaucracy. The Agrupación Marrón (Brown Group) of the SOECN, organized on the basis of a class-struggle program, was put to the test in each of these events that occurred in the province. And not only in Neuquén. We began to approach each place where there was a struggle: Mosconi in Salta, Brukman (a textile factory in Buenos Aires occupied by its workers in 2001), the oil workers, the popular assemblies, the Subte (Subterráneo - Buenos Aires Underground). We organized meetings of factories, participated in the piquetero assemblies, launched a newspaper called Nuestra Lucha (Our Struggle), everything that allowed us to unite with those sectors that were fighting against the bureaucracy and the bosses, these were our brothers and sisters. Then we proposed and launched various forms of coordination.
And amongst the ceramic workers we set ourselves the objective of revolutionizing the union. Many militant compañeros have reclaimed their organizations, but they do not fight to get rid of the bureaucratic heritage that remains. Many pass through a union, but after they lose it, everything remains the same.
For this reason, and after much discussion, debate and participation we approved the new statutes of the union: that the assembly is sovereign, that all leaders are recallable and that their positions be rotated; that minorities have representation; that the union is a class-struggle union and is therefore independent of the state, the employers and big business parties, and that it places itself at the service of the class struggle which extends beyond national borders. This is part of the program of the revolutionaries: the struggle against state control of the unions and for workers’ democracy. And we don’t stop there: we cannot simply fight - even if at times in a heroic and self-sacrificing fashion - for only purely trade-union claims. We set ourselves the most fundamental goal, the political perspective of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.
The last step, a very important one, that we took with the compañeros of the Agrupación Marrón, was the winning of a seat, a working-class and socialist seat, in the Neuquén Legislature (provincial parliament). It has the characteristic of having won a frontline position within enemy territory, but “with banner unfurled.” We maintain cohesion and have been making the same arguments for all these years. Since 2003 a group of leaders have considered the need to make a leap from the union to the political, and we were pushing for the formation of a political tool for workers. In these elections, the constitution of the Left Front at the national level between the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS - Socialist Workers Party), the Partido Obrero (PO-Workers’ Party) and Izquierda Socialista (IS - Socialist Left) aroused a lot of enthusiasm among many workers. So we held open plenaries of the Agrupación Marrón Ceramista from the four factories, that link us together with independent compañeros, and we jointly decided to be a part of the Front in Neuquén, and to vote for Alejandro López and I to head the list of deputies. Other compañeros were added to the different lists of the Front within Neuquén. We also face the prosecution of the Kirchnerist government against the left and militant workers and now we continue to fight for the acquittal of all the workers’ and peoples’ fighters, of which there are five thousand across the country and over five hundred in the province, including many ceramic workers, among them Alejandro and myself.
Zanon: Under Worker Control Since 2001
Neoliberal psychology
Why do we allow the logic of the market to occupy our minds?
All too often, critics speak of neoliberalism as a coercive, external force lying somewhere ‘out there’ in the political landscape. But many of us increasingly and voluntarily govern our lives in a manner mirroring the logic of the market. Is it any wonder, then, that this ideology has become so naturalised, and the alternatives so hard to see?
Neoliberalism is an elusive term, typically used to describe such processes as privatisation, deregulation, the cutting back of social and welfare provision, the retraction of the state, and the idealisation of free-markets: ideas thought to have been born in the minds of scholars in Paris in the 1930s before they emerged as a political reality in the 1970s.
But this definition ignores the fact that this movement has dug its ideological roots deep inside each one of us. Neoliberal rationalities are both political and psychological, serving to create a utopian free-market order with the power of the state and to extend this logic to every corner of society. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant puts it, neoliberalism represents an “articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third.”
Early neoliberal theorizing recognised that creating an environment that cultivates Darwinian-like competition actually requires a far broader set of rules. Thus, a key aspect of neoliberalism is not so much the rolling-back of regulation, but the type of society the rolling-out of state power is designed to uphold: striving to preserve whatever unequal distributions of talent and capabilities we are born with and whatever good or bad luck happens upon us through the chaos of life; frantically trying to fabricate an illusion of a level playing field; and disciplining those that break the rules or don’t even want to play.
But neoliberal theory didn’t only reject the earlier economic liberals’ belief that competitive free-markets emerge in a spontaneous natural order; it also extended this logic to the personal level, to the citizen, concluding that the rational, self-interested individual at the heart of neoclassical economics doesn’t ‘naturally’ emerge either. This gave rise to an even more active and insidious project to cultivate citizens who seek to compete in every aspect of their lives, chillingly captured by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 with her infamous statement: “Economics is the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”
This model of neoliberal citizenship has received wide-ranging attention from sociologists and political scientists to psychoanalysts and anthropologists. Michel Foucault conceived this new homo economicus as an entrepreneur of himself, shifting the liberal vision of people owning themselves as if they were a piece of property to a neoliberal vision of people owning themselves as if they were a business.
As property, people become devoid of notions such as duty, compassion and solidarity. They gain an artificial sense of separation from other people and from the ecology that supports all life, and seek fulfilment in increased wealth and consumption-a way of living that Aristotle and Siddhartha (the Buddha) would have dismissed thousands of years ago as thoroughly as any modern critic.
But within Neoliberalism there’s a shift: the world is no longer perceived simply as property to be consumed, but as an opportunity to be captured in order to increase returns to financial, social or human capital-a trickle down of capitalist rationality without a trickle down of wealth.
As a result, people become not only separated from each other and ‘nature’ in space, but also projected in time in a process of constant self-improvement, self-investment and the efficient application of one’s bundle-of-skills to maximize future returns. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean commodification, which is essential for capitalism's survival, but also the economisation of areas of human society in which no formal commodities are found. Thus, traditional non-market social norms are displaced by the cold-hearted, means-ends calculus of efficiency, investment, productivity, growth, costs and benefits, and calculated exchange-and along the way the quest for happiness is inverted: want to get rich? Get happy first.
What was once merely theory is now widely practiced. The neoliberal vision of the citizen was first made explicit in the abstract idea of human capital, but now it’s exemplified in more concrete ways every time volunteering in Africa is construed as a great thing to have on your CV; or when nine out of ten arguments for fighting patriarchy in the boardroom are appeals to efficiency; or where morning raves are promoted for their ability to improve productivity at work; or when the first thing on a list of 21 reasons to have sex is looking younger. Neoliberal rationality has become stunningly efficient at reproducing itself.
We can use Google Ngrams to visualise how this collective psychology has swept through society by tracking the frequency with which different words and phrases have been used in English-language books since the 19th century. By carefully selecting words and phrases that we encounter on a daily basis and which embody the spirit of neoliberal rationality, we find some fascinating patterns emerging near the beginning of the 1970s.
For example, there has been an explosion in usage of the phrase ‘sell yourself’-an unsettling sign of the way in which we have learnt to speak of ourselves in the language of the market. Now, we’re even encouraged to sell ourselves on our first dates. It’s as if we have abolished slavery only to replace it with a system of entirely voluntary self-commodification. Aside from the relatively chilled-out decade of the 1960s, time has also become a commodity that we buy, and in which we invest.
Politicians and policy makers make endless attempts to align self-interest with more desirable social or environmental outcomes (rather than appealing to collective responsibilities), a shift that’s manifested in the rapidly-expanding discourse around incentives. And the increasing usage of phrases like ‘it’s none of your (or my) business’ in contexts in which nothing is actually bought or sold shows how the idea of managing life as an entrepreneur has taken hold. Even in fervently anti-neoliberal writings we hear such phrases as ‘bang on the money’ applied to ideas about social justice.
Despite the tendency to see so much of personal, social and economic life as a calculated investment for future returns, contemporary societies don’t appear to have significantly increased their capabilities for solving their long-term problems. Threats such as climate change, exhausted food production systems and water supplies, antibiotic resistance, economic collapse, and the arms race remain mostly un-mitigated. So why do we still fail to react properly to such threats?
It appears that our lives have become almost permanently projected into a place lying somewhere between the present and the future. Our hopes, dreams, and quests for a meaningful existence are cast into a space in time that never actually arrives. It’s as if we’ve fabricated a kind-of secular afterlife-an imaginary destination that justifies the struggles of the present-although, unlike religious afterlives, this is one that we have to believe we’ll reach before our deaths.
These psychological impacts also seem deeply problematic in themselves. By cultivating the antithesis of a mindful, grounded way of living, it’s no wonder that we now hear talk of epidemics of depression, demoralisation, narcissism and other psychological disorders. But perhaps such issues have been breeding for far longer than the word ‘epidemic’ implies. Authors like Charles Eisenstein argue that a process of separation between people and nature began with the development of agriculture thousands of years ago, developing via the separation of the Gods from within nature to become forces of nature themselves, extending into the notion of human dominance over the natural world, and culminating in the neoliberal idea that we are not only separate from nature and each other but from our present selves.
Today, there does at least appear to be a growing recognition of the need to counter these trends, as evidenced by the surge of interest in mindfulness and meditation, which are becoming increasingly demystified by a growing body of scientific research. Predictably, the response of capitalism has been to appropriate these practices and direct them towards productivity and profits, nicely captured by Google’s ‘head of mindfulness training’ in a brand new neoliberal aphorism: “mindfulness opens the doorway to loving kindness, which is at the heart of business success.”
But the contradiction between the projected, atomised self of neoliberalism and the grounded egolessness of mindfulness is glaring. Business managers may believe that investing time in meditation will “pay dividends” in the form of increased employee productivity and reduced healthcare costs, but could a truly mindful consumer or investment banker ever exist? Perhaps such cultural appropriations will prove fatal to the psychological basis of neoliberal capitalism itself.
Neoliberal psychology