The Neocapitalist Employment Crisis
By Robert N. Bellah
Robert N. Bellah is professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Copyright 1996 Christian Century Foundation. Reprinted by permission from the July 31-August 7, 1996 issue of The Christian Century.
Any serious consideration of the neocapitalist global economy leads to some rather dark thoughts about our present situation that neither Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole show any likelihood of seriously considering. We may remember that through most of human history societies have been divided between a fortunate few, getting almost all of society`s tangible rewards and protected by State power, and a more or less miserable many. It is only in the modern age that societies have attempted to include all or almost all their inhabitants in a democratic community. The motives of the elite for this change were not necessarily charitable.
In traditional societies that mass of the population was engaged in low-skilled agricultural tasks; it needed not to be educated or motivated; largely it needed only to be controlled. But two features of modern societies changed all that. The first was the wars which marked the emergence of nation states. As a consequence of new technology these wars could no longer be fought by aristocrats on horseback: they required infantrymen capable of precision maneuvering and of mastering at least simple technology. With the industrial revolution a huge labor force was required to man the new factories. Since societies required the active and skilled participation of the mass of the population in the army and in the factory, such people could no longer be entirely excluded from society`s rewards, and so we built the modern welfare state.
The problem today is that, with the new technology, most people are no longer needed: not needed in the army, where technological sophistication, not masses of infantry, is the key to success (consider the gulf war); not needed in the factory, where computers and robots have replaced the workers on the assembly line. In short, besides the elite and its immediate subordinates, most people today are just not needed for anything except minimum-wage service jobs.
The problem for the elite becomes again, as it was in the old agricultural societies, how to control the masses, not how to include them: control them with TV as long as possible and with police and prisons when that doesn`t work. And if this is true within the advanced nations, it is equally true in relations between the advanced nations and the nations that are left out of the technological revolution. The daunting task before us, if we are unwilling to return to a world of closed classes and mercilessly exploitative elites, is how to share the enormous productivity of the new economy with those who in the narrow sense are no longer required by it.
James Fallows in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books has indicated the core of the problem:
With the help of computer technology, U.S. corporations have been winning the productivity battle….A dozen years ago, when steel and auto makers were announcing layoffs, Americans could explain away the loss of jobs as the death throes of badly managed, out-of-date industries. Now the most modern industries are the ones losing workers fastest. The very companies most closely associated with building the Information Highway have been among those shedding jobs in the biggest numbers.
There seems to be a new kind of macroeconomic law showing up here:
As the rate of new wealth creation fueled by digital technology rises, the number of people required to produce it decreases….The most important fact about these layoffs is that they result not from corporate failures but from what is defined as success….But they create a society of winners and losers that is unpleasant even for the winners to live in.
Unpleasant may be putting it mildly. Even the most ardent advocates of ending the welfare state would be appalled if they could see what will happen if we really do dismantle it.
Some years ago Fallows made a prescient comment that his recent article only confirms. He recounted walking down a street in Manhattan and finding every public telephone out of order. At the same time, he noticed that the people driving by in BMWs and Mercedeses were talking away on their cellular telephones. Here was a typical example of American private affluence and public squalor. Fallows`s comment was telling: the American economy may be doing all right, but the society is in terrible shape-and we do not live in an economy, we live in a society.
Let me give a very condensed version of our present predicament. Not much more than 100 years ago about 70 or 80 percent of Americans were on the farm; now only about 3 percent are required for farm labor, and the percentage is steadily dropping. Fifty years ago somewhat fewer than half of all Americans were employed in manufacturing, but today only 16 percent are, and the numbers may before long approach those for agricultural workers. The remaining 80 percent compose the vast amorphous category of service workers, largely underpaid and marginal, though there is a high end of service work-insurance, law, medicine, higher education, all of which are going through their own downsizing and re-engineering. We have all read of the hundreds of thousands of new jobs that continue to be added during the Clinton administration, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that two-thirds of these jobs pay under $20,000 a year and the other third range not far above $20,000. With the average wage for males being $30,000 and for females $22,000 we see where these new jobs are coming in.
The economy, it seems doesn`t need many jobs, at least many well-paying jobs, though that is where the wealth is. The society badly needs jobs. At every level service needs are not being met because it would not be profitable to supply them-think about the size of our classes in public schools and the pay of our teachers. It was recently pointed out to me that child-care workers make on average only $10,000 a year, a half to a third what others with comparable education make. We pay more to the parking attendants who watch our cars than to the people who watch our children. It seems obvious that only a massive transfer of wealth from our economy to our society will keep us from disaster. But such a move runs entirely against the prevailing neocapitalist ideological consensus.
If, as I and the other authors of Habits of the Heart argued in a recent issue of the Christian Century, voluntary community is only a very partial answer to our problems, where shall we turn? As long as neocapitalist ideology-which is more impervious to disconfirmation than the most dogmatic Marxism-maintains its hegemony, all talk about institutional reform may seem to be academic. It is one of the dangers of the neocapitalist vision that it is determinist, that it implies that there are no institutional choices: the market decides. One of the conundrums of contemporary individualism is that it can combine an absolute belief in the freedom of individual choice with market determinism. But this determinism is an ideological delusion: neither the global economy nor the stock market nor the profit margin can determine our institutional choices unless we as citizens let them do so.
I believe that neocapitalism offers a fatally flawed political agenda. It claims to be opposed to the state, yet it uses the state ruthlessly to enforce "market discipline." It creates problems that the market alone only exacerbates. Those of us with any sense of history know that this situation is not new. Capitalism is one of the most dynamic forces in human history, but also one of the most destructive. Joseph Schumpeter, one of our century`s great economists, characterized capitalism as a process of creative destruction. Repeatedly society has had to create institutions that will protect its members from the destruction without destroying the creativity-an uneasy balance at best. And repeatedly when societies have failed to protect their citizens from economic whirlwind, extremist movements of the left and the right have arisen, with consequences written in blood in the 20th century.
Capitalism today has fewer organized opponents than at any time in the last 100 years. Yet there is already handwriting on the wall. The fact that the global economy is not a win-win economy but a win-lose economy, with the losers being numerous and losing heavily, has begun to create a backlash felt in various ways throughout the world. In Eastern Europe it is expressed in the resurrection from the dead of communist parties, not because people love them but because the results of the free-market transition have been so devastating for most of the population. In Western Europe the backlash is expressed in new right-wing movements like that of the ultranationalist Le Pen in France or the neofascist Spini in Italy. Those who have watched interviews with members of the right-wing militia movement in the U.S. have noticed how often they speak of losing good jobs and not being able to find comparable work, a situation that affects millions of Americans.
It is ironic that only Patrick Buchanan, even though in a partial and distorted way, put the issue of the neocapitalist destruction of good jobs on the political agenda. For a few weeks there was a whirlwind of media attention to these realities about which millions of Americans have become all too familiar-the most remarkable being a stunning series on downsizing in the New York Times. But once Buchanan ceased to be a serious candidate the issue largely disappeared from media attention, nor has it reappeared in the Clinton-Dole debate.
Clearly, Robert Reich and others in the left-wing camp of the Clinton administration are aware of the problem, yet the corrective policies they advocate-focusing as they do on education-seem too anemic to make much difference. Only massive transfers of wealth from the economy to the society will seriously confront the job crisis that exists in all advanced industrial societies. In our present political atmosphere, facing that reality, our most profound political problem in the coming decades, is simply ruled out of discussion. If the churches don`t insist that it be discussed, who will?
