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Can the US Be Transformed?: 6 |
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Can the United States be Transformed? Hopeful Answers from Barack Obama and Riane Eisler
Howard Richards
Part Six
Obamian and Eislerian Transformations
Can the United States be Transformed? Hopeful Answers from Barack Obama and Riane Eisler
Howard Richards
Part Six
Obamian and Eislerian Transformations
Speaking in New York City on September 17, 2007, before a Wall Street audience, Senator Obama called for “…a re-appraisal of our values as a nation.” He went on:
“I believe that America’s free market has been the engine of America’s great progress. It’s created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It’s led to a standard of living unmatched in history. And it has provided great rewards to the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon for science, and technology, and discovery.
But I also know that in this country, our grand experiment has only worked because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle.” (Obama 2007A)
What could that higher principle be? Riane Eisler suggests an answer: Caring. (Eisler 2007) What is caring? Carol Gilligan once answered this question: “Caring is attending to and responding to need.” But what are needs? An answer to this question is provided by Manfred Max-Neef and his co-authors Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn. Needs stem from the condition of being human. They are few and finite. They can be classed in nine categories: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom. (Max-Neef et al 1991)
Obama goes on to say what “higher principle” he has in mind in somewhat different terms that as far as I can tell do not contradict what Eisler, Gilligan, Max-Neef, Elizalde, and Hopenhayn say, but rather add an agreeing voice to the same conversation:
“It’s the idea that we are all in this together. From CEOs to shareholders, from financiers to factory workers, we all have a stake in each other’s success because the more Americans prosper, the more America prospers. That’s why we’ve had titans of industry who’ve made it their mission to pay well enough that their employees could afford the products they made. That’s why employees at companies like Google don’t mind the vast success of their CEOs - because they share in that success just the same. And that’s why our economy hasn’t just been the world’s greatest wealth creator - it’s been the world’s greatest job generator. It’s been the tide that has lifted the boats of the largest middle-class in history.
“We have not come this far because we practice survival of the fittest. America is America because we believe in creating a framework in which all can succeed.” (Ibid.)
The famous and emblematic titan of industry who paid his employees enough to buy his products was of course the Henry Ford of the five dollar day and the Model T. The largest middle-class in history was of course generated not only in the USA but also in Europe during the same time period and under the guidance of the same economic philosophy, that of John Maynard Keynes. Obama frames these features of yesterday’s regime of accumulation in the context of a “re-appraisal of values.” He cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt as having called for a “re-appraisal of values” at a period of American history similar to ours, but he is careful to distance himself from saying that the USA is heading into another Great Depression (which would be political suicide since he could then be accused of undermining confidence in a system which depends on confidence). Obama says “we all have a stake in each other’s success” and then proves this claim with a tautology evoking a sentiment of patriotic solidarity: “the more Americans prosper the more America prospers.” Obama succinctly rewrites American history, attributing to all of it certain features of part of it, and attributing those features not to the requirements of the cold logic of capital accumulation but to a higher principle, a value, an idea: “…that we are all in this together.” (Ibid.)
Obama goes on putting new wine in old bottles, claiming for Americanism the social democratic ideal of solidarity: “Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. And so from time to time, we have put in place certain rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest. We have done this not to stifle prosperity or liberty, but to foster those things and ensure that they are shared and spread as widely as possible.” I think his Wall Street audience (and the others who learned what he said through the media) was aware that if “prosperity” were in actual practical fact and not just in occasional rhetoric to be “shared and spread as widely as possible” then the United States would indeed be transformed. I assume that “as widely as possible” does not mean in Obama´s mind or in that of any of his hearers an equal distribution of income. It must mean a distribution of income unequal enough (as in John Rawls´ theory of justice) to provide incentives that benefit everyone. Still, even if Obama and his hearers think that the huge salaries of the CEOs of Google are legitimated by the smaller benefits their subordinates also enjoy, the Obama message remains a transformative one: the bottom line is that everyone should benefit. It is a tribal message, a kinship of all citizens message, an inclusive message. It acknowledges that the communitarian goal of including everyone in the nation’s prosperity requires more than the jus gentium; it requires the bonds of mutual obligation that the bare-bones ethic that became the legal framework of commerce deliberately left out; it requires in Obama´s words guiding the invisible hand of the market with a higher principle.
I am encouraged because Warren Buffet and other Wall Street friends after hearing his speech gave him money for his campaign even though he told them he was going to raise their taxes. Many more who heard Obama´s reappraisal of values message in his many speeches across the country gave him money in smaller amounts and voted for him. I am encouraged because the acceptance of Obama´s message by the public suggests that the public believes something I believe: By promoting caring values we can change the iron laws of the market. However, it is not obvious that what I believe and what the millions who voted for Obama apparently believe is true. The fact that Keynesian/Fordist policies that Obama praises and perhaps wants to reinstate led in the course of time to the stagflation of the 1970s makes it necessary to ask whether Obama has a feasible plan. It is necessary to ask whether he has a plan for reversing several decades of ever-greater inequality, ever-greater destruction of the biosphere, ever-greater exclusion, and ever-greater violence; and for confronting the current downturn in which a system that has been made to run by waging a class war in which as Warren Buffet said “my class is winning” (Buffet 2007), and made to run by globalizing markets so that capital can freely roam the globe in search of opportunities to multiply itself—producing wherever labor with the necessary skills is cheapest, paying taxes through subsidiaries in jurisdictions where taxes are lowest (using creative accounting to show that the profits were made there), and selling to the affluent classes of the oil-rich nations, to the newly prosperous entrepreneurs of India and China, and to what is left of Keynes´ middle classes in Europe and America— is finally running out of steam and grinding to a halt and threatening to stop running: while at the same time bringing inflation under control and making the production of goods and services hum smoothly along. A formidable challenge. One that calls not just for new policies but for new paradigms.
If one reads the plans that the candidate has presented to the public one finds that they ring the bells of the American Ideals we all learned in school, calling on us to be the generation that transforms ideals into realities. One also finds that each plan presupposes full (or nearly full) employment without runaway inflation. The civil rights plan calls for reducing recidivism by providing ex-offender support so that ex-offenders will be reintegrated into society with jobs. The defense plan calls for expanding humanitarian activities (such as the military’s contributions to the tsunami in South and Southeast Asia) that will be, as will be all the other expansions Obama proposes (such as quadrupling Head Start) paid for without deficit financing (presupposing that inflation is not out of control). The disabilities plan proposes to end discrimination and create equal employment opportunity. The education plan will recruit, prepare, retain, and reward teachers (more spending to do without causing inflation). America will invest in education from early childhood through college, so that American workers “will be ready to compete with any workers for the best jobs the world has to offer.” (Obama 2007B). America will invest more in research, science, and technology with the same aim. The ethics plan clamps down on illegal and unethical business practices, including waste and fraud in defense contracting. Raising ethical standards may not seem at first to presuppose full employment without runaway inflation, but if one reflects with Michel Foucault that a high proportion of business activity has been for centuries past and is still today illegal business, then one will see the need for a robust legal economy to compensate for the massive loss of illicit ways of making a living that a successful raising of ethical standards would entail. Obama´s plan for families calls for a living wage, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation to guarantee that every working family will be able to pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing --- a plan that presupposes employers able and willing to pay a living wage. His fiscal plan calls for reversing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, ending tax-haven abuse, ending tax subsidies for oil and gas companies that are making record profits and instead imposing windfall taxes on them, and eliminating special interest corporate tax loopholes; while making government more efficient through such measures as smarter use of information technology and ending no-bid contracts to cronies. All employees including the self-employed and the owners of small-businesses will be entitled to buy low cost health care, with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions, and employers will be compelled to help pay for it. All the powerful special interests whose privileges Obama will curtail will be compelled to behave in more socially responsible ways, refraining from retaliating by cutting jobs and raising prices. Obama is in favor of working with Mexico so that Mexico too will have a full employment economy where people feel no pressure to migrate north to make a living. His rural policy is about increasing economic opportunities for family farmers.
The first plank of Obama´s anti-poverty platform is access to jobs. He knows about anti-poverty work firsthand from his own experience as an anti-poverty organizer in Chicago. When he speaks about that issue he knows well his confidence sometimes falters, as it did when he spoke on July 18, 2007 to voters at Anacostia, a miserably poor neighborhood of Washington DC just a few blocks from the White House: “What you learn when you spend your time in these neighborhoods trying to solve these problems is that there are no easy solutions and no perfect arguments. And you come to understand that for the last four decades, both ends of the political spectrum have been talking past one another.” (Obama 2007B)
“The moral question about poverty in America - How can a country like this allow it? - has an easy answer: we can’t. The political question that follows - What do we do about it? - has always been more difficult. But now that we’re finally seeing the beginnings of an answer, this country has an obligation to keep trying.” (Ibid.)
“So there are no easy answers and perfect arguments. As Dr. King said, it is not either-or; it is both-and. Hope is not found in any single ideology - an insistence on doing the same thing with the same result year after year”. (Ibid.)
“Today’s economy has made it easier to fall into poverty. The fall is often more precipitous and more permanent than ever before. You used to be able to find a good job without a degree from college or even high school. Today that’s nearly impossible. You used to be able to count on your job to be there for your entire life. Today almost any job can be shipped overseas in an instant.
“The jobs that remain are paying less and offering fewer benefits, as employers have succeeded in busting up unions and cutting back on health care and pensions to stay competitive with the companies abroad that are paying their workers next to nothing.
“Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that’s why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as President will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay.” (Ibid.)
“…while we can’t stop every job from going overseas, we can stop giving tax breaks to the companies who send them there and start giving them to companies who create jobs at home.” (Ibid.)
I cite ideas from Obama not just as ideas from Obama but as ideas that circulate and have resonance in a cultural milieu where he has become a leader; I cite them as encouraging and hopeful even when their feasibility is doubtful, and as perhaps most hopeful when the leader confesses that he does not know how to solve all our problems and calls on everyone else to contribute their ideas. At this point I suspect that readers who have more or less followed my reasoning and my quotations from Obama so far can be divided into three classes; (1) Those who from the beginning agreed with me that the dominant economic paradigm rooted in the cultural structures inherited from ancient Rome and early modern Europe needs to be transformed and can be transformed; (2) Those to whom seeing the imperatives that drive the global economy as consequences of socially constructed legal and ethical norms, and seeing the possibility of revising those norms so that we are no longer constrained by those global systemic imperatives, were new ideas when they started reading this paper, but who are now convinced that the sort of transformation to a caring economy that Riane Eisler and other feminist economists propose might in principle be possible, who are eager to learn how to make the transformation happen; and (3) those who are still unconvinced, who still see the ideas Obama´s audiences cheer as a set of policy proposals to be judged by whether they will work in the world as it is, who do not see the point of saying that they will not work in the world as it is, but they would work if and only if they become part and parcel of a culture shift toward more caring values. To reduce the risk of boring the readers I assume to be in classes (1) and (2), I will not make any further effort here to convince readers in class (3) but instead refer them to The Dilemmas of Social Democracies (Richards and Swanger 2006) and for those who read Spanish Solidaridad, Participación, Transparencia (Richards 2007) confident that anyone who reads one or both of those two books cover to cover will be convinced that sustainable full employment without inflation and without strong tendencies promoting violence and environmental destruction is not possible in the world as it is presently organized but is possible. (I might mention also that the two books cited are not only theoretical proposals but also case studies of working models.)
Eisler emphasizes, “We can’t change economic systems by just focusing on economics. Economic systems are embedded in larger social systems.” (Eisler 2007, p. 93) Goods and services are produced not only by businesses, but also by households, by the unpaid community sector, by nature itself, and by other sectors. We think much too narrowly when we think of “the economy” as a place where independent juridical subjects (honeste vivare) who own means of production (suum cuique) create jobs by hiring workers (pacta sunt servanda) in order to produce products to sell in markets (pacta sunt servanda again) governed by the obligation not to harm anybody (alterum non laedere) but with no positive social bonding calling on them to help anybody. Whether “the economy” so conceived is kept running by the Keynesian device of high wages to promote sales to middle class consumers, or whether it is put on the road again by the economic realist’s prescription of low wages and global markets, it is in fact only a part, not all, and not even the largest part, of the work that gets babies fed, the diapers of the elderly changed, that gets air into human lungs so that metabolism can proceed, lawns mowed, gardens weeded, children socialized, houses repaired, and water and nourishment to the places where they are needed in the cells of human bodies.
Riane Eisler knows a number of things that Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and the architects of post World War II Scandinavian social democracy did not know. She knows that neuroscientists have now demonstrated that when subjects engage in mutually beneficial behavior the pleasure centers of their brains light up. (Id. p. 189-90) Although environmental stress can inhibit the capacity for enjoying cooperation and sharing, there is strong evidence that the human species is “wired by evolution for reciprocity and mutual caring as an effective survival strategy.” (p. 190)
When it is acknowledged in a society that more than one normative framework organizes the provisioning of human beings with goods and services (viewing economics with a wider lens in Eisler’s terminology); when there is awareness that human beings are physiologically hard wired to support more than one culturally conditioned emotional repertory (with pleasure centers in the brain literally turned on by sharing); when anthropologists succeed in teaching the lesson that human beings have invented not one but many diverse basic cultural structures (including those of the Javanese peasants—much different from those of Roman Law—studied by anthropologist Ann Sutoro, Barack Obama’s mother); then one might say that the society is ready to implement the slogan of the students who demonstrated in Paris in May of 1968: l’imagination au pouvoir! Given that it is possible in principle to bring imagination to power, given that many people want to change from a dysfunctional system to a functional system badly enough to think different thoughts and alter their behavior, it is necessary to direct attention to the nitty gritty of operational details.
It is significant that Obama pays attention to improving the bankruptcy laws. Some details are normal elements of an old paradigm; others are harbingers of a new paradigm. The bankruptcy clause of the United States constitution (in Article I, section 8) is one of few openings in the constitutional law of the United States that provides relief from its rigid imposition of the basic cultural structures of the old paradigm, that of Rome, another notable opening being the power granted to Congress by the Sixteenth Amendment to tax income “from whatever source derived” including inheritance. The notorious doctrine of substantive due process makes suum cuique the law of the land, whatever the elected legislators or the voters they represent may say. The Constitution itself, and similar clauses in state constitutions, forbid the impairment of contracts. Nevertheless contracts are impaired every day in bankruptcy courts, authorized by the fact that bankruptcy proceedings are contemplated by the same Constitution. Life triumphs over death as the Hebrew principle of year of Jubilee (the year all debts were cancelled) carves out healthy exceptions to the Roman principle of pacta sunt servanda. Contracts are rewritten and sometimes executory contracts (contracts not yet performed) are cancelled. Businesses large (chapter 11) and small (chapter 13) are reorganized so that they can stay in business in spite of having run up debts that cannot be paid. Instead of or in addition to establishing a climate of confidence that induces investors to create jobs, the bankruptcy courts help investors to salvage firms they have already invested in. They take steps toward full employment by keeping the old jobs of workers and managers going, and sometimes they soften the blow for creditors by ordering part payment when if the firm had simply gone under the creditors would have gotten nothing. Obama proposes specifically to widen bankruptcy protection for persons burdened by unpayable medical bills, giving them a fresh start in life, and to widen protection for homeowners who cannot pay their mortgages, providing for rewriting the terms for payment of real estate debt by homeowners as businesses (but without Obama’s proposed amendment not homeowners) are already allowed to do.
The bankruptcy exception to the Roman rules suggests a general principle for a caring economy: Business failure should not be personal failure. No human being should suffer when a legal fiction, a corporation or other business form, is unable to balance its books. As in Sweden in the heyday of the Swedish model, society as a whole should expect that there will be sunrise industries and sunset industries. People who cease to work in the latter should be transferred to the former, with generous scholarships for retraining in between jobs.
Even more significant steps toward full employment have been taken in recent years by the bankruptcy courts of Argentina and in some cases not so much by the courts as by special legislation passed by Argentine provincial and national legislatures. When the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001, some three hundred among the thousands of businesses that failed continued to operate. Even though their owners decided to close them because they were not capable of generating any profits, their doors stayed open (or in some cases were reopened). They became enterprises operated by their workers, usually with the assistance of volunteer accountants, lawyers, and engineers from sympathetic political parties and/or from universities. There was a net gain in employment because businesses that generated no profits nevertheless generated wages. Orders from bankruptcy courts usually provided some accommodation with the creditors of the now worker-run firms, and with former owners who decided that they wanted their once-abandoned businesses back when times improved. The “recovered” industries joined what the Argentine economist José Luis Corragio calls the “people’s economy.’ (Corragio 2004, 2004) It is an economy whose objective is not to accumulate capital but to make a living. It includes all the small business people and self-employed repair and service people who earn for themselves the equivalent of a wage without having any employer who pays a wage to them. In neighboring Chile the “people’s economy” is estimated to provide a fourth of all employment. (Gobierno de Chile 2006)
The people’s economy does not require a regime of accumulation. It does not require a politics, a culture, and an ideology that make it possible for the production of goods and services to go forward by assuring investors that they will make profits. It creates jobs that do not exist in John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory (1936). When Keynes set out to calculate what the rate of employment and the rate of unemployment would be, he considered what factors would induce employers to hire employees. He did not consider that employees would hire themselves and each other. Obama’s proposals for health care back the people’s economy because they specifically include small businesses and the self-employed, making the same insurance now available to Members of Congress available at an affordable price to people who cannot possibly be insured under their employer’s health care plan because they have no employer.
The microcredit movement, a movement Obama’s mother was part of in Indonesia, with Women’s World Banking in New York City, and as a consultant in Pakistan, takes another step toward full employment without depending on a regime of accumulation. It is a movement that was pioneered by two Indian women, Jaya Arunachalam and Ela Bhatt, and further developed by Mohammad Yunuf´s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. In its best forms (when it does not degenerate, as it sometimes has, into just another way to turn money into more money) it not only gives small loans but also combines unionizing and cooperatives, and supports self-employed women whose work is often invisible. Part of it, the 700,000 member Self Employed Women’s Association of India, is led by women and is a combination of women’s movement, labor movement, and cooperative movement and incorporates Gandhian principles as well. (See http://www.sewa.org) The micro-enterprises are usually partnerships, and they often enjoy subsidies of one kind or another from public or private agencies. For example, in Rosario, Argentina, micro-enterprises get free booths at flea market fairs sponsored on weekends by the city government. The ones that produce food products get free training on how to comply with health regulations. The social democratic government of Chile (under its socialist president Michelle Bachelet) encourages micro-enterprises in organic agriculture and pays for advertising that touts the health benefits of their products. Thousands of other examples could be given from around the world; and, as one would expect, microcredit programs are featured in Barack’s platform and in Riana’s book. (pp. 209-10) With a few exceptions (such as a notorious poultry tycoon who got her start from the Grameen Bank) (Lappe and Lappe 2002) micro enterprises are a form of self-employment and a form of partnership.
While conventional economics makes employment depend on whether a potential employer believes that the cost of hiring will be less than the extra revenue generated by the worker hired (expressed in the theorem that the wage is equal to the marginal productivity of labor), a caring economics creates jobs that do not create profits. Whatever the good intentions of the owners of for-profit businesses may be, however socially responsible they may decide to be, and even when in the firm’s Mission Statement and Vision Statement there is language stating the providing of high quality employment to be an objective on a par with dividends to shareholders, nevertheless a for-profit business is limited by its need to make profits, if not maximum profits then at least reasonable profits. The for-profit sector cannot create full employment alone, except, as Keynes noted, under unusual historical circumstances which are usually of short duration. (Keynes 1936, pp. 249-50)
The socialization of large well-capitalized corporations employing advanced technologies, so that they become (more than they are already) what are sometimes called “good corporate citizens” is essential; as is the recycling of the profits they generate into channels that are ethically justifiable (of which there are many, from funding the retirement incomes of their senior stockholders, to being plowed back into the same corporation to study how to produce healthier products in more environmentally safe ways, to paying taxes that fund social programs, to name just three). Eisler presents evidence that caring practices, such as providing quality day care for the children of employees, often pay off for business in dollars and cents. (Eisler 2007, chapter 3; see also www.unglobalcompact.org)
Since large well-capitalized corporations are in most fields the institutions that can deliver quality products to consumers at affordable unit costs, most others who try to make a living by selling something cannot compete with them and are either confined to niche markets, or to working for large corporations not directly as employees but indirectly as suppliers or subcontractors or franchisees. Large corporations do not, however, employ the bulk of the labor force. Although the actual and potential contributions of large enterprises to the common good are essential, one contribution they cannot make is to create full employment. Even small business cannot create full employment, although small businesses and farms employ more people, both per unit of output and in total numbers, than large firms. For that reason supporting small businesses and farms, as Barack Obama does and as many other political leaders do, is a step toward full employment.
The creation of jobs by employers encounters an insurmountable barrier in the requirement that employers cannot continue hiring past their breakeven point. The creation of jobs by microlending and by supporting other components of the people’s economy encounters an insurmountable barrier in the requirement that even if the self-employed do not need to generate a return on capital at least they have to sell their products or services at cost-covering prices. This does not always happen. A full employment program must therefore break the sales barrier. It must de-commodify our highly commodified culture. It must rewrite one of the most deeply embedded stories of our culture: the story in which the happy ending is always the successful sale of a product or service to a customer who pays money for it.
A concept that breaks the sales barrier is that of “social entrepreneur.” Social entrepreneurs identify something that needs to be done, and raise money and other resources to do it, not (or not only) by appealing to customers to buy something, but by appealing to people who agree with them about what needs to be done. Backing social entrepreneurship is part of Obama´s program and message. He himself was a social entrepreneur when he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. Eisler gives some examples of social entrepreneurship in her new book:
· Ocean Robbins co-founded YES, Youth for Environmental Sanity when he was 16. YES holds camps for young leaders and activists around the globe, inspiring them to build a better world.
· Hafsat Abiola, the daughter of the first democratically elected president of Nigeria, found herself alone in the United States after both her parents were killed by the Nigerian military. She founded an organization to work to restore democracy in her homeland, and later returned there as founder of KIND, an organization that works to end gender discrimination. (p. 209)
Eisler adds, “There are today thousands of such social entrepreneurs, women and men, even boys and girls, with innovative ideas for solving social problems and the dedication to put these ideas into action.” (Ibid.)
Social entrepreneurship can be regarded as the conceptual opposite of capital accumulation. In capital accumulation investors start with money with the goal of turning it into more money. Money roams the planet seeking ways to produce marketable goods and services (when the system is working well and does not degenerate into a global casino of useless speculation) that will earn a high return. In the social enterprise, whether it is organizing a Little League team for the youngsters of the neighborhood or a movement to end hunger worldwide, the objective comes first. First comes the identification of the good or service needed. After that comes the search for the resources needed to produce it.
Corragio, who has studied the financing of social enterprises in Argentina, follows some Brazilian economists in calling this way of generating employment hybrid financing: the resources are hybrid in the sense that they come from a variety of sources that add up to what it takes to get the job done: in the Little League example it might be access to playing fields donated by public schools, money generated by selling tickets to games, uniforms paid for by a local dentist, contributions from parents, volunteer dads doing the coaching, United Way, etc.. and somehow it all adds up in such a way that some social entrepreneur makes a living putting this particular youth movement together in some part of the world and making it happen.
Community organizers in Chicago --not the Roman Catholic Campaign for Human Development Barack worked with but a group across town associated with urban studies at Northwestern University in Evanston-- have taken the logic of social entrepreneurship a step farther. (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993) Instead of first identifying a need and then mobilizing resources to meet it, they first find the resources and then look for ways to put them to good use. They have developed the technique of “asset mapping.” Community members meet to brainstorm about the skills, the experience, the institutional assets, and the physical assets that they have, not about what they do not have. Building community is done by connecting gifts. Instead of starting by identifying the hungry child in the neighborhood whose mother’s food stamps do not stretch to the end of the month, they start by identifying the elderly couple who have an apple tree in the backyard where the apples go to waste because they are too old to harvest them and nobody ever thought of inviting them to join a gift economy. Similarly, community activists in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, start by looking for underutilized resources. (Lappe and Lappe 2002) This sort of reverse economics, making sure every resource is used, can be compared to Jean Piaget´s studies of children learning to do what he calls “reverse operations.” In one of Piaget´s experiments children were asked to fit blocks into a box. They were unable to get all of the blocks to fit into the box until they reversed their approach. They were successful when they started by picking a space in the box and filling it, making sure every space was filled by a block.
Making high quality employment an explicit aim in corporate mission statements; creating bankruptcy, labor, business, and educational practices that separate business failure from personal failure; forging an industrial policy that does its best to insert the USA into the world economy in ways that build equitably shared prosperity; public-private cooperation with labor included as a player in the game; support for the people’s economy; microcredit; social entrepreneurship; and community organizing that effectively mobilizes the resources of a neighborhood are steps in the direction of full employment. They are not just government policies. They are elements of a culture shift. They involve everybody in and out of government.
When I say they are only steps in the right direction, I might be accused of overkill. Surely, it might be argued, if all that were done, then everybody would be making a living wage with good benefits. Not so. More is needed. Remember that it is a basic rule of our dominant cultural structures that nobody is obliged to do anything just because someone else needs it done. Until that basic rule is thoroughly transformed, we will all continue to be in danger of becoming homeless beggars because for one reason or another we lose whatever property we may have and because we are no longer able to offer anything for sale that buyers are able and willing to pay money for. Remember that throughout most of history most people have been poor, and that it was only during the Age of Keynes, which is now over, that the western democracies were able to achieve prosperity for majorities. Remember that it is not just a matter of finding jobs for those who now have none (realistically fifteen percent of those who need work, disregarding fudged official statistics that give lower numbers) but also a matter of coping with the onrushing economic crisis that nobody yet dares call a depression. Remember that in nations that have already had a crash, such as Indonesia, Mexico, and Argentina, millions who were formerly middle class have fallen into poverty; so we are not just talking about lifting out of poverty those who are poor now; we are also talking about lifting up those who are not poor now but may become poor. Remember that most poor people have jobs already and that full employment means upgrading them to a living wage. It also means replacing the jobs that will be lost when employers who cannot pay a living wage shut up shop. And remember that any success that may be achieved in curtailing the multi-billion dollar illegal drug business and\or in demilitarizing America will add millions more to the rolls of the job-seekers. And the robotic revolution has just begun. (Eisler 2007, chapter eight)
(Of course I regard as a pipe dream the notion that we can lift our fellow citizens out of poverty just by making United States export products competitive in global markets. And of course I do not believe jobs lost to robots will be replaced by other good jobs if we just leave the market alone.)
More is needed. What a conscientious business community and a conscientious civil society can do is to take measures in the direction of ending poverty like those mentioned above (as well as those other people think of that I have not thought of) not as a substitute for government-funded employment, but as an effort to make the tasks of government doable by reducing their magnitude.
After World War II Swedish social democracy showed the way by making the government the employer of last resort. Sweden conceives of itself, as its national anthem sings, as the home of all Swedes. Home is where you find security, and that implies employment security, health security, and old age security. What the private sector does not provide, the public sector will. That is what a public sector is for. Accordingly, Sweden established the principle of guaranteed employment for everyone. In effect, it established a new kind of minimum wage, since few people were willing to work for less than the wages the government was paying. (Richards and Swanger 2006)
The workers hired in Sweden’s government-as-employer-of-last-resort program were put to work mainly in county government jobs (Sweden is divided into counties) and mainly in the education and health sectors. The largest single contingent consisted of women who worked in early childhood education and in day care. Government work tended to be the kind of caring work that Martin Luther King Jr. said there was an inexhaustible need for. (King 1967) It was not robot work: It is an insult to leave an ailing elderly person in the care of a robot, as it is an insult to leave a child with a television set for a babysitter. Another area where the work that needs to be done is inexhaustible is in the greening of the economy. Obama’s program recognizes the employment potential of greening (sometimes using phrases that seem to have been copied from the writings of Earlham peace studies graduate Michael Shellenberger). The need for caring and greening work is immense, as is the need for jobs that pay a living wage.
The Swedish government found that it could not carry the burden it had assigned itself. In the end it had to abandon its role as employer of last resort because it could not pay for it. It could not raise taxes, which already averaged more than 50% of income. It could not comply with its other financial obligations in Sweden’s labor-government-business partnership and at the same time pay the wages of every Swede who did not find satisfactory work in the private sector.
My suggestion is that government funding for caring and greening work is much to be desired insofar as it is possible in the light of other priorities and constraints. Private business and civil society organizations should do as much as they can. Government should do as much as it can. Private-public cooperation to fight poverty should be standard procedure. Besides the risk of embarking on a program which in the long run proves not to be feasible, illustrated by Sweden, there is also the risk of moral decay inherent in guaranteeing work for every citizen, illustrated by the Soviet Union. I am informed and believe that despite the good intentions of many of its founders, in the Soviet system universal cynicism combined with massive inefficiency produced a scenario described by the well-known Soviet cliché, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” This brings me to Riane Eisler’s main point.
Eisler´s main point is that uncaring economic relationships are part and parcel of a broader pattern of uncaring human relationships. (I hope she will forgive me if I paraphrase and summarize in words that are not exactly the ones she would have chosen.) It is unrealistic to work for a caring economic paradigm separately from working for a caring social paradigm. She classifies human societies not in any of the traditional ways (although she would probably acknowledge that traditional words for classifying kinds of societies are sometimes useful) but instead by placing them on a continuum that runs from the “dominator configuration” at one end to the “partnership configuration” at the other end. The dominator configuration is similar to what others call patriarchy, but she chooses not to use that term. The dominator configuration values stereotypically male values of toughness and power-seeking, and systematically undervalues stereotypically female values of nurturing and serving the needs of others.
Human history for the past five hundred years (and also at some other times at some places) has seen the gradual rise of the partnership configuration. Partnership has risen not so much through what I call “tides” inherent in basic structures, and not so much by class struggle driven by self-interest, as through ethical appeals to the better potentials of human nature. Moral pioneers have led the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the green movement, the women’s movement, pro-democracy movements, the gay and lesbian and bi rights movement, prison reform movements, education reform movements, and many others. We are indebted to idealists and to the fact that evolution has constituted the human species in such a way that we can be moved by stories and images that tap the caring side of our nature for the many advances toward the partnership end of the continuum that we enjoy today.
The last several decades, which I have characterized as a shift from a Keynesian/Fordist regime of accumulation to a neoliberal regime of accumulation, Eisler characterizes as regression toward the dominator configuration end of the spectrum. (Eisler 2007, p. 101) She engages the religious right on their own terms: They advocate regression to old-fashioned family structures where the father wields the rod as an Old Testament patriarch, and at the same time they cheer for military confrontation in foreign policy. Eisler connects the dots, advocating progression to an equal partnership of women and men in the home as an essential part of the same sea-change in values that will support a peacebuilding foreign policy. And a caring economy. She cites a great deal of empirical evidence to show that the observed patterns of human values and attitudes fit her dominator/partnership explanatory model. Although there are exceptions, the pattern in the data is that people who were mistreated as children tend to favor a violent foreign policy as adults.
Transforming the basic structures of the economy is part of the same culture shift that makes women equal to men. The shift raises the status and pay of stereotypically feminine work. Teaching children dignity and respect by treating them with dignity and respect is part of the same partnership configuration that will end poverty. Although conversion to caring ways in later life is possible, there is a strong tendency for dominator attitudes learned in early childhood to carry over into later life as political authoritarianism, economic indifference and exploitation, racial and ethnic prejudice, homophobia, domestic violence, hatred of nature, low self-esteem, crime, and war. There is an equally strong tendency for partnership attitudes learned in early childhood to carry over into adult life in the “do-gooder,” “bleeding heart,” and “naïve liberal,” behavior patterns that hosts of right wing talk shows love to despise, but which Riane Eisler loves to honor and works to redeem.
“A caring revolution is a sea-change. It is the cumulative effect of all the ripples flowing from giving visibility and value to the most important human work: the work of caring and caregiving.
“When the economic importance of caring and caregiving in the household is made visible, workplace rules such as flextime, job sharing and other partnership economic inventions gain currency. Men do more of this work as its value is more generally recognized, and women and men participate equally in the formal labor force and have the same opportunities and responsibilities at home. Schools offer education for good parenting and teach skills for caring personal relations. Governments fund universal health care and high quality child care, as well as parental leave for both fathers and mothers. People are happier at home and in workplaces. All this promotes better care for children, and helps produce the high-quality human capital needed for a healthy, equitable economy.” (Eisler 2007, p. 226)
The good news in terms of the discussion that led into this précis of what I take to be Eisler´s main point is that full employment need not lead to universal cynicism and massive inefficiency. When a society orients toward the dominator end of the continuum, when women do a double shift working all day and waiting on men at night, when fear is the ruling passion, then what are on paper equitable institutions may in practice be jungles where power-seeking petty tyrants prey on resentful victims whose only desire is to beat the system however they can, and if they cannot beat the system then to beat whatever they can beat. But human nature lends itself to better cultural constructions. The long term trend line of the past five hundred years has been toward partnership. Eisler cites evidence that workers who feel secure and feel cared for are more productive, not less. (Eisler 2007, pp. 55-56) Caring is efficient.
Eisler envisions a future in which the ex-poor enjoy hugging whomever they can hug and the rich become Rotarians. “There’s no longer an underclass that can barely meet its survival needs, or elites who amass enormous wealth as substitutes for meeting their yearning for caring connection, fairness, and meaning. Rather than investing resources in technologies that take life, societies invest primarily in technologies that support and enhance life.” (Eisler 2007, p. 228) Readers of Joseph Schumpeter, or of any of the authors who have studied the history of the behavior of economic elites as distinct from abstract economic theory, will know that Eisler is not being unrealistic when she expects a culture shift to produce a shift in investment priorities. What is called “the marginal efficiency of capital” in economic theory, and is supposed to explain and predict investment, is in practice shorthand for naming the fact that those who control resources do with them whatever they decide to do. (See Keynes 1936, p. 141, p. 148) It varies according to who controls the resources, what they desire, and what potential customers and other members of the surrounding public desire.
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