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Businesses The Almighty Buck

'The Language of Capitalism Isn't Just Annoying, It's Dangerous' (theoutline.com) 510

An anonymous reader shares a report: When General Motors laid off more than 6,000 workers days after Thanksgiving, John Patrick Leary, the author of the new book Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, tweeted out part of GM CEO Mary Barra's statement. "The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future," she said. Leary added a line of commentary to of Barra's statement: "Language was pronounced dead at the scene." Why should we pay attention to the particular words used to describe, and justify, the regularly scheduled "disruptions" of late capitalism? Published this month by Haymarket Books, Leary's Keywords explores the regime of late-capitalist language: a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that he argues promulgate values friendly to corporations (hierarchy, competitiveness, the unquestioning embrace of new technologies) over those friendly to human beings (democracy, solidarity, and scrutiny of new technologies' impact on people and the planet).

These words narrow our conceptual horizons -- they "manacle our imagination," Leary writes -- making it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society. We are encouraged by powerful "thought leaders" and corporate executives to accept it as the language of common sense or "normal reality." When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we're seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we're implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence. After all, if you're not conversant in "innovation" or "collaboration," how can you expect to thrive in this brave new economy? [...] Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies, what we're living through is just the next iteration of an old system of global capitalism. In other words, he writes, "cheer up: things have always been terrible!" What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts. He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.

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'The Language of Capitalism Isn't Just Annoying, It's Dangerous'

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  • Book (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:05AM (#57870060) Homepage Journal
    This doesn't require a book, everyone knows about corporate speak. Write your thoughts on a blog. You will get a couple of thousand readers.
    • Re:Book (Score:5, Funny)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:16AM (#57870130)

      But think about all the extra money he would make from royalties from the book. A lot of people will pay top dollar to reinforce their views against capitalism.

      The biggest problem is that I am not sure if I am being sarcastic or not.

      • Re:Book (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:56AM (#57870344)

        But think about all the extra money he would make from royalties from the book. A lot of people will pay top dollar to reinforce their views against capitalism.

        The biggest problem is that I am not sure if I am being sarcastic or not.

        Any conflicts you might have are probably based on the differences between unfettered and controlled capitalism. Capitalism in it's purist form is suicidal. What is surprising is that more people don't realize that an economy based on greed needs some control over that greed. Since greed lies along a spectrum, from people who are altruistic, to people who can and do kill other humans to secure wealth in their sociopathic level of greed. Some want it all.

        It also tends toward the common mistake of humans that they don't understand simple math. Pure capitalism will attempt to accumulate all other money, especially in it's corporatism mutant form. The simple math is an equation. If the corporation has no customers, or almost no one can afford to buy their products - it makes no money. If all of the potential customers are out of work because " The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future.." as the lady said, they miss the profitable part.

        It's all well and good to make money. A lot of it is fine. I loves me my money. But in today's corporatism/capitalism world, it appears that some folks think you can make money without having any customers. Or by demanding first world prices at the some time as demanding third world wages.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Funny you should bring up books but "Dianetics: The Modern 'non'Science of 'un'Mental Health" to be clear I added the non and the un, I could not leave those words in the referenced state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], eww.

        I think corporations are being pushed out of spiritual realms, too many voices too compete with and pretty much same with cultural, again too many voices to compete with. They focus on politics, controlling legislation and tilting in their favour and beyond to establishing long term

    • We rely on it for our bullshit bingo. Don't teach managers to talk like people, those speeches they tend to hold in front of all of us would get a lot more boring if we can't do our beer betting pool anymore!

  • True thing. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:07AM (#57870068)

    When companies have the power to disrupt societies, one manager thinking and taking bullshit can do a lot of damage. It always has been that way but these days or highly optimised society has become more fragile which makes bullshit more likely to cause damage.

    • Every person has the power to disrupt society. However their effect is dependent on how many people are listening to them. The thing is it isn't the quality of their message, but enough people listen to them, they will get followers and cause damage.
      Companies have bosses who employee thousands of people so what they say there is a number of people listing to them.

      • by bondsbw ( 888959 )

        Bosses: "Agree with me, if you like employment... or decent hours, pay raises, and a career path."

        I haven't personally had a boss like this. I don't know if I'm typical or lucky, but I do know some have real jerks above them with no realistic options to leave for a better situation. That's why it is so important to legally decrease their influence.

        • Hey boss, I found something new.
          It offers more of money and less of you.

      • In theory, every person has the power to disrupt society. In practicality, however, one does not disrupt society without facing legal consequences from those poised to lose a lot of money. People who's material wealth has been threatened, fight hard to retain it. If you want to disrupt society, are you willing to give up your freedom to do so?
    • Re:True thing. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:36AM (#57870244)

      GM is adjusting to the transition from internal combustion engines to electric; it's not one manager or one company, it's the entire industry. Some product lines and manufacturing facilities are obsolescent. Society will move on.

      He also claims that capitalism is expanding at an unprecedented rate into previously uncommodified geographical, cultural, and spiritual realms.

      This guy has no room to talk about gobbledygook.

      But that aside it shouldn't surprise anyone that capitalism is expanding; it's the best economic system of the alternatives we have. Communism has failed every time it's been attempted.

      • Re:True thing. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:01AM (#57870380) Journal

        But that aside it shouldn't surprise anyone that capitalism is expanding; it's the best economic system of the alternatives we have. Communism has failed every time it's been attempted.

        With apologies to Churchill, it's the worst form of economic organization, except for all the others.

      • Re:True thing. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:23AM (#57870502)

        "GM is adjusting to the transition from internal combustion engines to electric; it's not one manager or one company, it's the entire industry. Some product lines and manufacturing facilities are obsolescent. Society will move on."

        While this is true, it's not insightful. It's misleading.

        Sure the "entire industry" is transitioning, hopefully, but the entire industry isn't failing while doing so. Other companies aren't laying off due to obsolesce, in fact there's no evidence that the transition has produced obsolesce at all. Look where GM has laid off, does closing down EV lines look like something a company would do because EV transition has made facilities obsolete?

      • Re:True thing. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Alwin Barni ( 5107629 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:30AM (#57870558)

        Lets not forget that:
        - there are always people behind any corporation, there is a person writing, reading and executing these directives
        - there are no black and white situations when considering human beings (mostly - as otherwise this very statement would contradict itself)
        - there is no country implementing pure capitalism, it's usually various blends
        - countries implementing various blends of capitalism having democratic governance are the best places for people to live guaranteeing them stability, freedom and prosperity
        - we the people (in democracies) have the power to fix the problems of our state
        - the time we live is the best so far in human history, the most stable, the easiest - especially in the so called "western democracies"

    • Perhaps the government should quit propping up failed companies to the point that they become too big to fail. In the case of GM or other U.S. automakers, I'm not particularly worried since people will still need cars. You won't disrupt society so much as a few thousand workers, some of whom will get jobs at Tesla, Honda, or whatever company needs to increase their production to pick up for the company exiting that market.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:08AM (#57870076)

    Not the language of capitalism.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:11AM (#57870096)

    You know, after you run out of other people's money.

    Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.

    Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The wall will spend other people's money so I guess it's a wall built by socialism.

      How about you build a personal responsibility wall around your own property?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

      "late capitalism" is better than "late socialism". You know, after you run out of other people's money. Like the millions fleeing Venezuela have discovered.

      False dichotomy and false equivalence. Authoritarianism is what ruins economies, not socialism. Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.

      Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?

      Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive. If we could build a physical barrier could keep your kind of willful ignorance out then I'd help build it myself.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.

        This does not appear to be the case.

        It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it. Or allows a bunch of parties that collude to throw up a "cordon sanitaire" to keep the popular ("populist") voice out of it. Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life. Say the guy who said that "democracy is like a train; you get off when you get where you want to be." (US, various countries in Europe, Turkey(!); other obvious referenc

        • Democracy is vital to keeping power in check.

          This does not appear to be the case.

          It still allows the elite to collude and, say, form effectively a bi-partisan" one party system out of it.

          It's true that Democracy in the US needs some improvement in representation, such as ranked voting.

          Or allows a guy to get himself elected president, then president-for-life.

          once you stop having elections to replace leaders, you stop being a democracy.

          That is, democracy by and of itself is not sufficient, for it can itself be subborned.

          Absolutely correct. Democracy needs people to maintain it.

          You have not shown it is necessary either. Eg. with a vigorous king who regularly chops heads off of his uppity barons so the rest'll keep their heads down (and who otherwise doesn't do much more than give barons jobs to do) you might have decent checks on power as well. Barbaric, yes. Effective, that also. No democracy, yet functional checks on power.

          If the barons can be killed on a whim then are not the power, the king is. In your model, there is no check of power on the king.

          Because the awfulness is disinformed people like you who do not want to learn but are easily manipulated, not refugees looking to stay alive.

          Read: The "progressives" like their labour cheap

          If that is true then why are "progressives" also advocating for a higher minimum wage? Do they want cheap labor only to pay them more money?

          This is a 70s era sociology department trick: If you agree with it, it's true. If you disagree, it's "relative", or the sayers are "disinformed", or what-have-you.

          No, I

    • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @07:56PM (#57873450)

      The thing is that a lot of folks reduce this whole topic down to a binary point of capitalism versus socialism. That's not just you saying, better of two evils, but there others that would say, "socialism is the only cure to capitalism" or some BS like that. The whole thing is that our current model of capitalism isn't good. It encourages less diversity and bigger more centralized, more too big to fail companies. I'm not saying ditch capitalism, but clearly our current approach is less than ideal.

      Funny, if the US is so damn bad, why don't "progressives" support building a wall around it to keep people out of the awfulness?

      I have no idea what that has to do with anything other than sounding edgy. I'm not progressive in the sense of economics or security in any sense, but even I think the wall is a silly idea. The US as a nation doesn't adequately fund anything, hell we've got bridges that have millions of people going over it that have spent the last two decades needing repairs. But some wall that 99.995% of the nation will never see is going to kept tip-top? Call me skeptical, but even if the wall got built, I'll put my dollar here on parts of it falling down and the number of people caring about that, being countable on one hand in two/three decades hence.

  • by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:15AM (#57870122) Homepage

    You probably have a weak argument if you put it into the passive voice so you don't have to admit that it originates with you. I pronounce good writing dead at the scene of this shill's Twitter account.

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      You probably have a weak argument if you put it into the passive voice so you don't have to admit that it originates with you. I pronounce good writing dead at the scene of this shill's Twitter account.

      It's a play on a common reporting line: "X was pronounced dead on the scene/on arrival/etc."

      • by Entrope ( 68843 )

        In those cases, it is clear who declared the person deceased, and it is literally true. In this case, the book-shilling stooge apparently wanted to obscure his own agency in making a ridiculous claim about language.

        • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

          Also, it doesn't even make sense. How does a buzzword filled sentence that is clear to the target audience kill the language?

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:23AM (#57870166)
    it's a common propaganda technique. We all laughed when the Iraqi information minister tried to do it since he was completely doomed.But when you control the media the technique's the same every time.

    Put another way: "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.".

    Works too. This is why we need to teach critical thinking via the humanities in school. Critical thinking _can_ be taught, but you need a subject that's simple enough for folks who don't do it naturally and where being 50% right has value. STEM doesn't work for that. You'll note the wealthy make it a point to give their kids a well rounded education. This is why.
    • by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:07AM (#57870406) Homepage

      The humanities have done enough damage, wouldn't you say? The "speech is violence" nonsense on modern campuses can be directly traced to their "teachings".

      Critical thinking should absolutely be taught, but let's not leave that to a racist and misandric group of idiots.

  • So ... everyone who was upset about the biased NR opinion piece from an opinion journal will be showing up anytime now to complain about this one.

    Right? Guys?

  • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies

    So he decries the use of buzzwords and than invokes the buzzy "late stage"

    Look there is no reason at all to think we are in "late stage" capitalism. Capitalism as Adam Smith defines it has only really been tried in the 19th and 20th centuries and the societies that embraced it are still existent. We don't know where this road ends or if it ends.

    All Leary's argument unless the book actually bears little relation to the summary (highly possible this is slashdot) shows is his imagination is as manacled by la

    • by Shotgun ( 30919 )

      Calling our current economic system "late capitalism" suggests that, despite our gleaming buzzwords and technologies

      Look there is no reason at all to think we are in "late stage" capitalism. Capitalism as Adam Smith defines it has only really been tried in the 19th and 20th centuries and the societies that embraced it are still existent.

      How you figure? Capitalism has been one of the two natural ways that humans have interacted since they started trading. They either exchanged value for value through mutual agreement (free market capitalism), or one group forcefully took from another (crony capitalism, socialism, monarchies, etc). Granted, Adam Smith did pen a good description of how capitalism actually works, but did it not exist way before he was even thought of?

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:41AM (#57870266)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:45AM (#57870288) Journal

    What is new, Leary says, quoting Marxist economic historian Ernest Mandel, is our "belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts.

    That's new? What were they doing in 1955 then if not having '"belief in the omnipotence of technology" and in experts'?

    Or is this some value of "new" that I am not familiar with?

  • by blahplusplus ( 757119 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:49AM (#57870306)

    ...the reality is the reason we have so many problems is because people who are irrational have equal power with the people who are rational.

    For those who rail at these words, the reality is right now we live in a lawless oligarchy that's has been basically stealing everything that is nailed down and has been since the US's founding. To even suggest any modern capitalist state "is a democracy" is just utter bullshit when it has been owned lock stock and barrel by corporations for most western states history with brief interruptions of world war 1 and world war 2 and the cold war to try to soften the ruthless harshness of capitalist societies.

    Now with the fall of the USSR corporations are unchecked and out of control and being enabled by a heavily indoctrinated public.

    Don't think so? Every time IP law came up for review to benefit the public it was pushed to benefit the rich and their corporations.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    The reality is the general public in the US worships their robber barrons. George carlin said it best about americans.

    Carlin [youtube.com]

    Look at the distribution of wealth, it is just insane, anyone who thinks they live in a society that benefits the many is uninformed.

    US distribution of wealth

    https://imgur.com/a/FShfb [imgur.com]

    Wealth in america [ucsc.edu]

    • It works so long as checks and balances work. Once they've been co-opted, as in the current situation in the US, then all bets are off. The legal situation allowing corporations to be treated as people really was the end. It basically legalized the wholesale purchase of influence that killed checks and balances. All corporations have to do is ensure that politicians whom do not support their business interests do not get reelected. The gradual whittling away of what constitutes bribery has further contribut
  • There are still a few linguistically conservative capitalists out there who are concerned about showing their full hand immediately, they use this flowery rhetoric to try to sugar coat their aims. The rest just lay it out as it is - the workers will be punished for being smaller cogs in the large machines while the fat cats will keep getting fatter. Perhaps the former group believes their choice of words makes them better Christians, but they are all playing for the same goal.
  • "Deploy" language? (Score:4, Informative)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:57AM (#57870354) Homepage

    Some pointy-haired types talk all in buzzwords. It's annoying, in fact, it's just as annoying as the author, who uses phrases like "deploying language".

    Meanwhile, capitalism remains the only system to heave literally billions of people out of poverty. Generally speaking, the only people who have a problem with capitalism are either pure socialists (who believe that all your marbles belong to the government) or corporate cronyists (who believe that all your marbles belong to companies - enforced by the government). And sure enough: this book was "inspired by a previous work of a similar name: the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society."

    For your reading delectation, I leave you with the concluding paragraph from one of his papers [boundary2.org], if you can stand this sort of navel-gazing prose:

    When we consider innovation’s religious origins in false prophecy, its current orthodoxy in the discourse of technological evangelism—and, more broadly, in analog versions of social innovation—is often a nearly literal example of Rayvon Fouché’s argument that the formerly colonized, “once attended to by bibles and missionaries, now receive the proselytizing efforts of computer scientists wielding integrated circuits in the digital age” (2012, 62). One of the additional ironies of contemporary innovation ideology, though, is that these populations exploited by global capitalism are increasingly charged with redeeming it—the comfortable denizens of the West need only “stand back and admire” the process driven by the entrepreneurial labor of the newly digital underdeveloped subject. To the pain of unemployment, the selfishness of material pursuits, the exploitation of most of humanity by a fraction, the specter of environmental cataclysm that stalks our future and haunts our imagination, and the scandal of illiteracy, market-driven innovation projects like Mitra’s “hole in the wall” offer next to nothing, while claiming to offer almost everything.

    • See some videos here [youtube.com]

      The TL;DW (didn't watch, it's youtube after all) is that the World Bank set an arbitrary definition of "poverty" ($1/day or so) and then periodically changes the numbers to make it seem like folks are lifting out of poverty (now it's $1.06/day and a million more are making $1.08/day, congrats, 1 million "lifted out of poverty").

      Meanwhile the actual quality of life of those million people hasn't changed in the slighest...

      It's a trick meant to keep you from questioning the estab
  • JP Leary is just another tired Marxist who wishes he could have stormed the barrikady with Lenin, Stalin, and the gang. Haymarket books is likewise a collection of aging hippies and millennial socialists romanticising the glory days of axe-handle-swinging unionists throwing bombs at police.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/aut... [jacobinmag.com]

    Fuck radicals of both ends of the spectrum. We need to ignore them more.

  • by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @09:59AM (#57870368)
    I'm an anti-capitalist but calling the language of capitalism "dangerous" is a bit of a stretch. Certainly, the language is extremely annoying, pompous, and overused. It sounds like a bunch of business majors jerking each other off and using a bunch of larger words often incorrectly to appear educated. When I think of dangerous, I think of immediately life threatening. I will need to buy a new car come February and it won't be a GM. Citizens wrongly bailed those assholes ou.
  • Capitalism is OK, it is fine. The problems begin when it turns into the Imperialism as it was proven by the classics still in 19th century.

    The main issue is that the Imperialism leads to an imperialistic world war.
  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:03AM (#57870392)
    Corporations are no longer stewards of society in general, and only looking after interests of shareholder. As such corporations have no reservations to damage society to the benefit of shareholders. This, in itself, is what will doom Western society.

    You can't have powerful agents (i.e. corporations) act as sociopaths and have society as a whole succeed. There are two solutions to this - reduce power of corporations (i.e. socialism) or change rules governing corporate behavior to disincentivize antisocial behavior (i.e. strong regulation and anti-monopolist laws). Without this, we will have a new era of Robber Barons. Arguably, silicon valley technocrats are already there.
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:04AM (#57870394)
    ... everything else, including the workers of a company, is little more than a means to that end. You can parse the words of press releases all you want, but, in the end, Capitalism is all about maximizing profit of the owners at the expense of everything and everyone else.
  • by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:14AM (#57870446)

    I think people are overly concerned about the MBA-speak used, but aren't paying sufficient attention to the actions of said MBAs.

    "Late-stage capitalism" or whatever you want to call it is about squeezing every single drop of productivity out of an already-stretched system. This is where the disruption comes in...everyone is focused on removing every pocket of slack. Replace taxi companies with a phone app that summons drivers directly to you to kill taxi companies. Outsource every single corporate service to the lowest bidder rather than hiring people directly to lower your costs. It's a race to the bottom and if you ask me, it is beginning to have an effect on society in general.

    When I graduated in the late 90s, it was still very common for people to have decent mid-level jobs at large companies. A generation before, it was even more pronounced. Now, in the name of agile and disruption, businesses are killing any stability that was there in favor of contracting positions and outsourcing functions. The problem is this...in a previous time it was possible to party your way through a management degree, get randomly selected for some generic position at a company, and use that position to establish a decent family life. The societal change that's happening is that fewer people are able to stay employed in an area. This will eventually lead to people being more nomadic, having fewer children, renting apartments instead of buying houses, and not contributing to any sort of community.

    Once you're out of your 20s, most people aren't really excited about pulling up stakes and moving across the country over and over again to chase yet another contract position. Those plants GM is closing are going to dump a ton of previously well-established workers into the nomad pool, chasing lower-wage positions. Union factory work used to be the only way for people with less education to earn enough to support a decent quality of life. This is the disruption people need to think about. If you put the work in by getting educated, your reward should be a stable living that lasts a career. The problem is that these cycles of consolidation and slack-removal are growing shorter and people are likely to experience a major disruption more than once in their working lives.

    Economies that have humans involved need slack. The current system just assumes we're machines.

  • by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Friday December 28, 2018 @01:38PM (#57871754)
    The 'G' word: Growth. That one really grinds my gears. Why is everything about growth? Ok, great, a little growing is good for us but on a planet with finite resources a bit of perspective would be useful.

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