by Steven Poole
Most radical of all the attempts by business to insinuate itself into pre-existing civil vocabularies was the borrowing of the term ‘corporation’. It originally meant a political grouping of people united along local-government, religious, or other lines. Its first use in a commercial sense came in the US, noted by Charles Dickens in 1842.56 The word literally means embodiment. By the process of ‘incorporation’, the company becomes flesh, and is understood in law to be a person. Conversely, the rhetorical attitude of corporations to their workers took a dehumanising turn: remember how the phrase ‘human resources’ implies that people are undifferentiable assets that can be used up and replaced. Thus, by means of Unspeak, businesses became people, and people became fungible matter.
Having borrowed terms from the vocabularies of civil virtue and domestic life, commerce in the twentieth century rendered itself more exciting by opening a new front on the language of war. A businessperson could already be described, for example, as a ‘captain of industry’. The naval metaphor may be intended peacefully, as though industry were merely a flotilla of luxury yachts, sailing lazily down the river; but a ‘captain’ was originally the director of a warship. Meanwhile, businesspeople conducted corporate ‘raids’, and engaged in ‘battles’ in the boardroom and price ‘wars’ with competitors. Commercial products were ‘launched’, like rockets from an artillery tube. Employees were ‘fired’, as though they were mere cannon fodder. Such warrior vocabulary combines with the use of business metaphors in war – military interrogators at Guantánamo are just another kind of ‘professional’; while missiles and bombs are ‘delivered’, like courier packages – to blur the rhetorical lines between the two pursuits. Any shift in the tenor of public language from war to peace and back again is usefully minimised. War is business as usual.
The exploitation by business of two apparently opposed lexicons, one of peace and one of war, may be traced simultaneously in the word ‘executive’. From the mid-seventeenth century, it had denoted the part of government – the ‘executive branch’ – concerned with carrying out the law. The application of the word to employees of businesses, dating only from the early twentieth century, might thus have been an attempt to cloak commerce in a halo of associations with justice, law, and proper government.57 As businesspeople and politicians developed ever more symbiotic relationships, the use of one word to cover them all perhaps seemed appropriate. But to ‘execute’, of course, had also long meant ‘to put to death’, and a bloody tang of power still clung to the idea of ‘executives’ conducting their business according to martial metaphors, as well as to Executive Orders that authorised torture. Also exploiting the latent authority of the term, Islamist radicals who murdered people by beheading or other means claimed, in messages to the West, to ‘execute’ them – a word that, merely because it sounded exciting, was often adopted by the western press to describe those very actions. ‘EXECUTED,’ ran the one-word headline describing the May 2004 murder of Nick Berg in Iraq in London’s Evening Standard newspaper. Of course, for a killing to be described as an ‘execution’, it must be preceded by a legitimate judicial process. To describe slaughter-as-PR as an ‘execution’ was therefore to be complicit with the murderers’ own justifications.
Meanwhile, a US Navy admiral said that Al Qaeda had gone from being ‘an IBM-type of organisation’ to being ‘like McDonald’s’.58 This was meant to explain how Al Qaeda operated more as a franchise than as a centralised command structure. But it also illustrated how in all matters, from democracy to terrorism, business was now the prevailing frame of reference.
Trading in freedom
The idea that everything is now subordinate to what ‘capital’ wants to ‘see’ is not merely an idée fixe of paranoid anti-globalisation protesters, but stated clearly in public by those who minister officially to capital’s desires. Back in the US, George W. Bush declared: ‘We need to reform our legal systems so the people, on the one hand, can get justice; on the other hand, the justice system doesn’t affect the flows of capital.’59 First a hasty sop to liberals – acknowledging that, sure, people should still be able to ‘get’ justice, just as they pop down to the store to get a can of soda – and then the remarkable notion that justice, on the other hand, should never interfere with the operations of money. So justice is a subeconomy within the larger one (you can ‘get’ justice), but it has no right to interfere with overarching systems of profit. Justice is subordinate to and dependent on capitalism, as is even ‘the strength of our families’, according to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.60
To argue, in the same fashion, that ‘freedom’ was dependent on the oil business would sound like another conspiracy theory had it, too, not been officially stated. In May 2005, US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman celebrated the opening of an Azerbaijan pipeline that would carry crude from the Caspian Sea to the US while avoiding Russia and Iran. Bodman said: ‘As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market economic reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom.’61 That is an awful lot for one pipeline to do: not content with carrying oil, it also provided the foundation for the advance of freedom. It was truly the little pipeline that could.
The order of priorities in western ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ was again evident in the spiritually ascendant language of another Bush pronouncement: ‘In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives.’62 It seemed the commercialists had finally got their way: markets were indeed acknowledged to be quasi-divine autonomous systems raising all to heaven. Why, then, if they were so free, could they not be left alone to function in their utopian way? Bush was not just compelled to tell Vladimir Putin how to change his country in order to clear a path for the march of free markets. The mollycoddling was necessary domestically as well: ‘It’s important for the markets to see that we’ve got enough discipline in Washington, D.C. to make hard decisions with the people’s money,’ Bush said in 2004.63 This speech was reported the next day in the New York Times under the headline ‘Bush Says Social Security Plan Would Reassure Markets’,64 as though ‘markets’ were frightened children.
How protean, indeed, these markets were. On the one hand, they dispensed God’s justice, free from any interference by merely human justice; yet on the other hand, when the rhetorical occasion demanded, the markets were vulnerable little flowers, in desperate need of ‘reassurance’. It is true that markets, being essentially consensual hallucinations, depend on confidence, but calls to ‘reassure’ them on one point or another are often made for unstated ideological reasons, if not to disguise a simple motive of private profit. Similar kid gloves were apparent in former UK Trade Secretary Margaret Beckett’s announcement that ‘Britain’s businesses need to be able to trade throughout the world’s markets as easily as they can in home markets without facing high tariffs, discriminatory regulations or unnecessarily burdensome procedures’.65 Businesses may indeed want these things, but for Beckett to say that they ‘needed’ them, presumably in order to flourish maximally, was to endorse their wants without weighing them against the wants of others.
After her trip to Latin America, Condoleezza Rice had gone on to declare: ‘A region that trades in freedom benefits everyone.’66 She did not mean, we can assume, trading in freedom like trading in textiles or precious metals: I will sell you this much freedom for so many bananas. Celebrating the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Rice was invoking again the concept of ‘free trade’, under the auspices of which, as British Chancellor Gordon Brown once explained, poor countries have ‘obligations’ to ‘create the conditions for new investment’.67
The freedom granted by ‘free trade’ was not quite symmetrical. Among the ‘obligations’ of poor countries under World Bank and International Monetary Fund deals have been, for example, the obligation to import food from the heavily subsidised US and EU agricultural indu
stries, thereby driving local producers out of business; the rich countries kept high tariffs on imports such as clothing and leather goods, thus preventing the poor countries from competing freely.68 Meanwhile, ‘creating the conditions for new investment’ meant, for example, allowing western companies to take over indigenous public services and run them for profit. Water privatisation in Manila and electricity privatisation in India have resulted in price increases of up to 80 per cent; in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, ‘profit-maximising behaviour has led privatised companies to keep investments below the necessary levels, with the result that rural communities and the urban poor were further marginalised in terms of access to electric power and water supply’.69 Tens of millions of pounds of the UK’s aid budget were given to ‘privatisation consultants’ at big accountancy firms, the acceptance of whose advice was made a condition of aid to poor countries.70 To render the enlargement of such ‘free trade’ more palatable to an increasingly informed and concerned public, the IMF, in a transparent coup of Unspeak, had simply changed the name of its ‘structural adjustment programmes’ to ‘poverty reduction and growth programmes’.71 No one would be so churlish as to disagree that ‘poverty reduction’ was a fine idea, yet there was no new evidence that the same old policy, thus relabelled, would actually achieve it.
One meaning of bringing freedom to Iraq, in particular, was clear in George W. Bush’s May 2004 explanation of why things were going so well in that country:
[A] growing private economy is taking shape. A new currency has been introduced. Iraq’s Governing Council approved a new law that opens the country to foreign investment for the first time in decades. Iraq has liberalized its trade policy, and today an Iraqi observer attends meetings of the World Trade Organization.
International lawyer Philippe Sands explains that Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 39 had ‘opened much of Iraq’s economy to foreign ownership [and] … stretched the limits of what an occupying power was entitled to do under long-established rules of international law’.72 Note that what Bush acclaims as ‘foreign investment’, implying generosity, Sands translates bluntly as ‘foreign ownership’. The order, in fact, made possible total foreign ownership of industries in all sectors except that of ‘natural resources’, defined closely as oil and gas;73 in a subsequent interview, trade minister Ali Allawi did not rule out future foreign ownership in those industries either.74 Business and income taxes for ‘investors’ would be capped at 15 per cent. The Iraq economy was thus obliged to be much more ‘free’ than, say, the US itself, which has laws governing foreign ownership of media companies, among others, and whose politicians worked hard in the summer of 2005 to ensure that a Chinese takeover bid for its oil company Unocal would fail.75 Bush’s implication that the Governing Council was the source of the Iraq ruling, meanwhile, hid the fact that the Council was essentially obliged to rubber-stamp (‘approved’) the US order. Of course, these agreements were not simply a one-way street, and Iraq enjoyed some quid pro quos. In July 2005, for example, it was announced that the US would reduce to zero its import tariffs on Iraqi dates.76
The US Congress had voted to spend $18.4 billion of taxpayers’ money to reconstruct post-war Iraq. By the end of June 2004, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority had spent only $300 million of this sum. Instead, up to $20 billion of the Iraqi people’s own money, kept in the Development Fund for Iraq and meant by the UN to be used ‘in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people […] and for other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq’,77 had been handed out, most in no-bid contracts to American corporations such as Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, and in ways that were poorly accounted for.78 It was later alleged by Henry Waxman and the House Committee on Government Reform that in one such contract, Restore Iraqi Oil, Halliburton had overbilled by ‘more than $177 million’, charged to the Iraqi people.79 (In logistical contracts paid by the Defense Department, Halliburton charged $100 to clean a bag of laundry, and hundreds of millions for meals that were never served to troops.)80 In September 2004, the $18.4 billion of US money meant for reconstruction was reassigned to counter-insurgency warfare. For Iraqis, it seemed, freedom came at a rather hefty price.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush had quietly signed an order granting blanket immunity from criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits in the US to any American company or individual working in any industry related to the Iraqi oil business.81 Perhaps that was what he meant when he scrawled, on a note from Condoleezza Rice informing him that ‘Iraq is sovereign’ in June 2004, the possibly rehearsed reply: ‘Let freedom reign!’82
All kinds of liberties
If Rice had meant not ‘free trade’ but trading in freedom like trading in bananas, it would have sat well with another current in thinking about freedom. Just as the world of ‘commodities’ is one of many various individual things, so it makes sense to some people to break ‘freedom’ itself down into lots of little freedoms. In his ecstatically gloomy book on democracy, historian John Lukacs moaned:
If liberalism’ means the extension of all kinds of liberties to all kinds of individuals, mostly as a consequence of the abolition of restrictions on all kinds of people, these have now been institutionalised and accomplished in formerly unexpected and even astonishing varieties of ways. (And with not a few fateful and, yes, deplorable consequences, such as laws approving abortions, mercy killing, cloning, sexual ‘freedoms,’ permissiveness, pornography … a list almost endless.)’83
It is curious that a list containing just six items should cause Lukacs such emotional anguish that he sees it as ‘almost endless’. (A thing is either endless or it isn’t; this one patently isn’t.) In putting scare quotes around ‘freedoms’ in the phrase ‘sexual “freedoms’”, Lukacs is clearly not objecting to the plural use, since he is happy to say ‘liberties’. Rather, he seems to be saying (without saying why) that this kind of freedom is not really a freedom at all – and since freedoms are plural and separable, this one ought just to be abandoned, for the moral good of society. This contrasts with the classical liberal view of freedom as one thing, hedged around by law but homogeneous, in terms both of the set of ‘rights’ it affords individuals, and the relationship of each individual to everyone else, so that unjustly to curtail one person’s freedom is an insult to all. The growth of civil rights – or, if you prefer, the march of freedom – thus consists not in adding extra discrete freedoms to those we already have, but in approaching ever more closely to the ideal of this one big freedom, defined by Thomas Paine simply as ‘the power of doing whatever does not injure another’.84
Robin Cook, discussing in 2005 the British government’s plans for house arrest of ‘terrorist suspects’, summed up this view in the phrase: ‘Liberty is indivisible.’85 However, to complicate matters, that same phrase has also been used by those who think that the ultimate good is ‘free markets’. In this tradition were the remarkably named Young Americans For Freedom, a group of ninety conservative-minded college students who in 1960 set out their principles: ‘That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom […] That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation.’86 Here again we find the age-old hard sell, that the operations of markets are actually a source of ‘moral strength’. Yet these Young Americans (’Do you remember your President Nixon?’ David Bowie was to ask them some years later) were also somewhat confused on the indivisibility or otherwise of freedom, since their same manifesto also refers to ‘liberties’ in the plural.
Yet if freedom is really fungible (just as people are, according to Donald Rumsfeld), then the resulting ‘freedoms’ can be thought of as just another symbol of exchange, a currency. I will decide that you can have these freedoms but not those others. And she can have these freedoms, but he can’t. If other social systems, such as
justice, are declared publically by officials such as George W. Bush to be subordinate to capital, it might be that the exchange of freedom is too. John Lukacs writes: ‘People throughout the world are now customers (I write “customers” rather than “beneficiaries,” since many of those “benefices” are indeed questionable), of “freedoms” of which less than a century ago even the most radical liberals would not have dreamed.’87 Deplorable, isn’t it, having to watch people go about their lives enjoying such pseudo-‘freedoms’? What is interesting is that by writing ‘customers’, Lukacs assumes that the economic metaphor of ‘freedoms’ as commodities is appropriate. He would perhaps be surprised to find that in this, though for evidently different reasons, he coincides with Noam Chomsky, who writes:
In a well-functioning capitalist society, everything becomes a commodity, including freedom; one can have as much as one can buy, and those who can buy a lot have every reason to preserve an ample supply.88
Remember that ‘commodity’ used to denote something inherently good; now, everything inherently good, such as freedom, may be viewed as a commodity. Tony Blair bought into this worldview when he declared that: ‘Security is life’s most precious commodity.’89 This will doubtless have cheered locksmiths, manufacturers of burglar alarms, and architects of ‘gated communities’ everywhere. For they were selling ‘security’, which means protection from assaults on one’s liberty. In other words, they were trading in freedom.