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FYF A Gentler Capitalism OpEd by Harold
Meyerson, Washington Post, Wednesday, January 4, 2006; A17 On the field of
ideology, 2005 was a lousy year for the American right. Twice -- in the
president's proposal to privatize Social Security and in the government's
failure to save New Orleans - it confronted the public with the prospect of a
radically reduced government. Twice, the public recoiled at the sight. In
retrospect the year's biggest mystery is how George W. Bush thought he could
privatize Social Security. Essentially Bush assumed the role of the national
CEO who tells his workers he's dumping their defined-benefit pensions for some
ill-defined 401(k) investment schemes. And essentially the American people
responded with the same anger and anxiety that airline and auto employees have
shown when their bosses reneged on their commitments of a secure retirement.
The difference, of course, is that the American people have a lot more power as
voters than they do as workers. Bush's plan to scuttle
Social Security was in tatters when Hurricane Katrina blew ashore. For Bush
this was a double whammy, since FEMA's failure to respond to the storm
underscored the image of a government that would not be there when needed. In
today's America, where business has largely abandoned the guarantees of
security it used to provide its employees, a similar abdication by government
was clearly not what the public sought. For the pervasive
insecurity that is inextricably part of today's capitalism has become the
dominant fact of modern life. "The fragmenting of big institutions has
left many people's lives in a fragmented state: the places they work more
resembling train stations than villages," writes sociologist Richard Sennett in "The Culture of the New Capitalism,"
a newly published collection of lectures he gave at Yale University in 2004.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the insecurity endemic to capitalism was
mitigated by business institutions organized, as Sennett's great predecessor
Max Weber first noted, along military lines. The corporation gave the employee
a place and a ladder, and in such a lifelong institution, Sennett notes,
"it became possible to define what the stages of a career ought to be
like, to correlate longtime service in a firm to specific steps of increased
wealth." Sennett is no
apologist for the old corporate order, but it did impart a structure to
people's work lives and a place to hone their crafts. The new workplace, by
contrast, is a brave new world of short-term employment and relationships,
where experience is not necessarily a virtue and institutional memory is
sketchy at best. It may be a fine place for young workers, but "as middle age looms and children, mortgages and
school fees appear, the need for structure and predictability in work grows
greater." The frequent migration of executives from one firm to
another, Sennett adds, imposes further costs on employees: "This
managerial revolving door has meant that the steady, self-disciplined worker
has lost his audience." In the absence of a more structured work
life, what Sennett sees is a more muddled sense of self. He finds that confusion among displaced
middle-aged workers, but also among young college graduates who, compared with
their counterparts of the 1970s, are less able to articulate their career
goals. In an economy that disdains continuity, how exactly do you define
"career"? From his interviews
with a wide range of workers, Sennett turns up a widespread resignation to
these immense changes in economic life. That doesn't mean, though, that the
American people aren't reacting to this profound shift in their lives, and
their sense of their lives. The
increased prominence of religion in American life over the past several decades, I'd surmise, is in part a reaction to this embattled
sense of self. And if most Americans take globalization as a given, many are
increasingly enraged at our relatively open borders and the immigrants who
cross them. These are two responses to the new insecurity that the right has
exploited, though neither does anything to reestablish a more benign economy. For the left, what
2005 has demonstrated is that while Americans have no great love for
government, they do expect it to provide a baseline of security - the more so
since the employer-provided benefits of the past 60 years are going the way of
the dodo. That means that government-supported
universal health insurance will soon be back on the nation's agenda. But that's
the easy part.
Rebuilding the kind of security that defined private-sector economic life for
most of the past century, and that helped individuals define themselves, is a
conundrum that's daunting even to contemplate. And yet: The new
capitalism disdains stability; human beings, on the whole, don't. And immodest
as it may be to alter the terms of capitalism, it's a damned sight easier than
changing human beings. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010301275.html |
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