The stud of cultural studies
One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. Thomas Frank. Doubleday. 414 pages. $40

From the National Post, January 13, 2001

The left still enjoys telling fairy tales about something called Socialism (or the even more fantastical Communism), an ideology that scared Adam Smith acolytes senseless until 1989, when the capitalist pigs became wolves and finally huffed and puffed and blew the wall down. Since then, with few exceptions, the left has been wandering around in a daze. The rise of brand-based activism as seen in the Seattle and D.C. protests was the only bright spot for a left rendered impotent by a bull market that has trammeled upwards with reckless abandon throughtout the 90s.

The left's main strength remains it's scalpel-like precision in identifying the shortcomings of our political and economic institutions, be they Michael Moore, Kalle Lasn (Adbusters magazine) or Noam Chomsky. But formulating a plan of action remains beyond the left's grasp. And sadly, that includes Thomas Frank. I say sadly because Thomas Frank's 1995 essay, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent" -- first published in The Baffler #6, and available in the book Commodify Your Dissent --changed my life. His discussion of rebel consumption, along with his description of how the counterculture was so cleanly subsumed into 1990s advertising blew my mind wide open and many of my opinions and analysis of marketing, advertising and business developments have involved that sincerest form of flattery.

Frank frustrates me doubly because he has the ability to lead us to the promised land. He honed his chops at The Baffler, a journal of cultural criticism he founded in 1989 that specializes in salvos directed at the creation and commodification of Gen-X. The Baffler has become a mental militia camp for young leftists, nurturing writers like Stephen Duncombe and Tom Vanderbilt into respected authors. Frank became head drill-sergeant with the release of his best-selling 1997 book The Conquest of Cool which built upon "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," explaining how the 1960s counterculture was successfully married to the fashion and advertising industries to create "a new species of hip consumerism, a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption."

Since Conquest, Frank has been name-checked by The Wall Street Journal among others and wields considerable pundit power. So I was excited to read his deconstruction of the myths and mythology of the New Economy -- as propagated through the literature of Wall Street, management theory, marketing and advertising. His book couldn't come at a better time -- to read the magazine Fast Company is to experience history as written by the victors of hypercapitalism. Fast Company details a nation of free agents driven by revolutionary and entrepreneurial zeal and describes offices populated by liberated workers, hipster executives and jean-clad knowledge workers -- with the late 90s accoutrements of pierced tongues, pets under desks and free beer in the fridge.

Or at least it was, until late last year. Now, with a recession looming and hundreds of dot-bombs leaving scooter-riding IT workers unemployed, it's a good time to reconsider the e-revolution. As Frank points out half-way through One Market Under God, the excitement over e-commerce conveniently omits "the downsized workers hired back as temps to do their old jobs; the contracts lost because management kept laying off and rehiring the workforce; the once-prestigious companies that were downsized so senselessly they fell apart; the CEOs who, as payment for having engineered these disasters, collected instant riches."

One Market Under God examines the formation and proliferation of what Frank calls market populism, an economic philosophy that came to prominence during the 1990s, and one in which the ideals and opportunities afforded by democracy and those of the free market are interchangeable. The DOW and the NASDAQ became devices of popular empowerment and, "When pundits spoke of the stock market having been 'democratized,' they implied that the market now functioned like a democracy; that the market represented the people, that it acted on the people's behalf, that it spoke in the vox populi."

Yet even MIT economist and New Economy cheerleader Lester Thurlow has admitted that 86 percent of the bull market gains in the past four years have benefited the richest 10 percent of the population. For all the overheated rhetoric about day-trading rebels and teenaged stock market millionaires, real wages stagnated during the 1990s despite increases in productivity. But to attack market populism, Frank notes, is to get caught in a tidy little trap: "Since markets express the will of the people, virtually any criticism of business could be described as an act of despicable contempt for the common man."

Frank is difficult to dismiss, because he actually reads enemy propaganda, poring through the glossy-paged ghettos of Business 2.0, Wired and all those banal business books to extrapolate what the corporate elite are thinking. And it's downright scary. He takes his most damning material directly from the source and levels his angriest screeds at management theorists: "In what by rights should be the hardest-headed corner of American life, one encounters PhD-bearing experts on 'aura,' full-blown astrologies of 'leadership' and 'creativity,' theories of art and learning so elementary they could have been lifted from the back of cereal boxes, and responsible adults devoted utterly to self-awareness tracts originally written for teenagers."

Frank isn't the first author to detail the demoralizing effects of the Free Agent Nation. Richard Sennett's 1998 book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in New Capitalism and more recently Naomi Klein's No Logo have tackled the problems of a workforce subjected to capricious downsizing, reduced job security and the indignities of temping. But Frank is the first to suggest that the lack of a white collar revolt proves the success of the business theories he lambastes: "[I]t was thanks to the revolutionary crowing of Fast Company that so many left the parking lots of their former employers in such an orderly fashion, talking confidently about their impending careers as 'free agents.'"

Frank is a cultural studies stud, combining a strong grasp of popular culture with deft insights and cutting turns of phrase to create an accessible but damning critique of the past decade of corporate, political and cultural thought. His prose isn't without faults, given his "I have a Ph.D. and you don't" semantic hectoring (witness his trademark use of $25 words like mulcting, encomiasts and efflorescence) but it is balanced by a newfound wit that would make his hero H.L. Mencken, proud. Frank notes how easy it is to mistake Who Moved My Cheese? -- a parable about treating downsizing as an inevitable but necessary occurrence -- for "a book written by a child and vanity-published by doting parents," before turning vicious a few pages later when he asks, "Will the time ever come, Americans might well ask, when we get to move management's cheese? When the people, 'little' though they might be, acquaint society's erstwhile cheesemasters with this 'inevitable' fact: That there is no social theory on earth short of the divine right of kings that can justify a five-hundred-fold gap between management and labor; that can explain away the concentration of a decade of gain in the bank accounts of a tiny minority."

His anti-cheese crusade shows Frank pushing the bile to the tip of his, and by extension, our tongues, but then leaving it there to fester. Frank is a New Deal socialist, which is fine, I suppose, except that he is unable to find a functional time machine to transport him back to the 1930s. His book details how nearly every New Deal initiative has corroded or disappeared, but fails to explain how -- with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton having shifted the left to the right -- we can possibly expect to right the wrongs. Time and again, Frank's necessary, thorough and damning analysis manages to extinguish any hope the reader might possess.

Yes, the New Economy drones who now hold stock option tissue paper need to unionize, yes the left needs to attack the gross inequities created by hypercapitalism, yes the shiny gloss of the e-business literature and management theory is shockingly vapid, yes, the USA Today / Gannett revolution is stifling an already weakened journalistic impulse and yes, Clinton has betrayed the left and inflicted deep wounds that need to be bandaged or cauterized. But until someone is able to formulate a plan of attack, One Market is more rage against the machine, the kind of sexy angst-ridden analysis that is simultaneously vital, yet palatable enough to commodified for a mainstream audience, an irony that will hopefully not be lost on Frank or his followers.