The prophets tell powerful stories and they have the means to make sure they are heard, but this doesn’t mean that people always believe their stories or are duped by their message. Ideology is much more subtle. As historian Barbara Fields explains, ideology is the “descriptive vocabulary of day-today existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day.”8 But it is not, philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek argues, something we can discover and remove from our field of vision, only to reveal the true, nonideological world. Ideology is the world itself, inhabiting and structuring all the spaces in which we live and think.9
Oprah, Sheryl Sandberg, and the others are not trying to hide the true structures of power behind our daily interactions. Their stories are a reflection of the capitalist society that already exists, refracted through beliefs and values that already help structure our world. They appeal to common narratives and plots and reinforce our current system of values and beliefs. They reference a shared reality that is perfectly aligned with the needs of capital. Challenging these stories would require a fundamental rethinking of our current way of life, a prospect that evokes fears of violence and disorder, and a deeper apprehension that in the process of transforming society we might lose ourselves and the essence of who we are. It would require us to challenge common sense and fight through what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called our deep-rooted economic fatalism: the “belief that the world cannot be any different from the way it is now.”10
Part of overcoming economic and political fatalism is critically examining the arguments of these new prophets and understanding their shortcomings. This book is a small attempt at this goal. It draws from the work of talented, dedicated scholars studying development, political economy, ecology, social movements, labor, gender, and education to examine what elite storytellers are telling us and to argue why we should be skeptical of their claims to alleviate poverty, environmental degradation, inequality, and alienation.
I begin by focusing on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s call for women to lean in and seize positions of power and her broader contention that all feminist strategies are compatible with one another. Sandberg is a powerful voice for women and she believes in the feminist project, but her model for liberation won’t achieve the goals of feminism. Sandberg’s entreaty may work for some women, but on a systemic level it strengthens the forces that oppress and divide women.
Chapter 2 examines eco-capitalism and the growing trend of “sustainable” production and consumption by looking at Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s model of conscious capitalism. Mackey’s narrative highlights key problems with the rapid spread of global capitalism and its devastating impact on the environment, but his model fails to challenge the underlying contradictions and imperatives of for-profit production. Human needs can be satiated, but the profit motive cannot—even “sustainable” production in a capitalist system cannot protect the environment from overuse and potentially irreversible damage.
Chapter 3 peels back the layers of media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s model of self-help, spiritual capitalism. At a time when the American Dream seems more out of reach than ever, Oprah’s message resonates and replicates through all avenues of life. Her helping, healing, self-empowerment message turns up on college campuses, has been adopted by legions of internet entrepreneurs, and is echoed in the vision of organizations like the Freelancers Union. But by emphasizing individual strategies for success, Oprah and other prophets of the empowered self downplay the real structures of power and inequality in our society. They place the burden of success on the individual, in the process disguising societal shortcomings as personal failures and blinding us to collective visions of change that challenge alienation and inequality.
Chapter 4 moves to issues of global poverty and educational reform in the United States through an analysis of the philosophy and practices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The confidence and sophistication of the Gates message is seductive. They have powerful connections and deep pockets. They seem not only to know how to fix problems, but also appear to be already doing the fixing. However, instead of alleviating the ills of capitalist markets, the Gates Foundation’s policies deepen the reach of capitalist markets to provision of basic human needs such as healthcare and education, and hence reinforce the divide between the rich and the poor.
The final chapter returns to the spirit of capitalism. In this present moment of uncertainty and crisis a new spirit of capitalism is being formulated that incorporates the critiques and ideas of the elite storytellers discussed in this book and around the world. But the new prophets may not have the last word. Social movements are also telling stories and developing projects that radically challenge the capitalist status quo through an emphasis on democracy, de-commodification, and redistribution. These stories and projects foster a new vision of society—a society designed for people instead of profit.
________
1Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2007.
2See Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.
3“The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission,” quoted in Noam Chomsky, “The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality,” Australian Quarterly 50: 1, 1978, 8–36.
4Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
5David Harvey, “The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis This Time,” in Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian, eds., Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, New York: New York University Press, 2011.
6Miles Rapoport and Jennifer Wheary, Where the Poor and the Middle Class Meet, New York: Demos, 2013.
7There are many prophets of capitalism telling stories today. People like Bono and Tom Friedman could easily be added to the list. See the work of Alan Finlayson on “Bonoism.”
8Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1:181, 1990, 110.
9The 2006 film written by and starring Žižek, A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, offers a concise explanation of his views on ideology.
10Pierre Bourdieu, “A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism,” New Left Review 1: 227, 1998, 125–30, quoted in Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 180–81.
1
Sheryl Sandberg and the
Business of Feminism
Fifteen years ago Silicon Valley was inhabited by packs of brogrammers slouching around in hoodies and sandals, hacking code on bean bag chairs, and regurgitating South Park jokes. In the intervening years the start-up scene has changed—a bit. Computer technology has been mainstreamed, and women have joined the high-tech gold rush. Tech mammoths like Facebook, IBM, Yahoo!, Hewlett-Packard, and Google all employ women in leading roles.
But despite the power of women like Sheryl Sandberg, Ginni Rometty, Marissa Meyer, Meg Whitman, and Susan Wojcicki, the gender balance in Silicon Valley and the larger corporate world remains highly skewed, and most leadership positions are held by men. At tech companies only 2 to 4 percent of engineers are women; at Fortune 500 firms, 4 percent of CEOs are women. Boardrooms are a bastion of maleness, and many companies, like Twitter, have no women on their board. This disparity extends beyond corporate America: globally, 90 percent of heads of state are men, and at the 2014 World Economic Forum only 400 of the 2,600 representatives present were women, a 17 percent drop from the previous year. And 2013 marked the first time women held twenty seats in the US Senate.
This is the world into which Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, launched her “sort of manifesto”, as she called it, in 2013.1 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead addressed the persistent gender imbalance in elite jobs and announced Sandberg’s entrance into the century-old struggle for equality in the workplace. From he
r position of power atop the ping-pong tables and mini-fridges of tech-land, “feminism’s new boss” (as Gloria Steinem likes to call her) is exhorting more women to “lean in,” scale the “corporate jungle gym,” and not stop until they reach the top.
Sandberg’s manifesto is a New York Times bestseller and has sold over a million and a half copies. Sandberg has been pushing women to be more ambitious for a number of years, through female networking events in Silicon Valley, Women’s Leadership Day at Facebook, and monthly dinners for women at her home. In 2010 she extended her message through a TED Talk that went viral, and followed up with an equally popular 2011 commencement speech at Barnard College. Lean In revisits and expands the themes in these speeches and argues that women need to stop being afraid and start “disrupting the status quo.” “Staying quiet and fitting in … aren’t paying off.” Instead of waiting for someone to place a tiara on their heads, women need to seize the social and economic gains they want. If they do, Sandberg believes this generation can close the leadership gap and in doing so make the world a better place for all women.2
Like many prophets before her, Sandberg makes her case by telling the story of her own path to success. Sandberg worked her way up to the top from middle-class beginnings: her father was an ophthalmologist and her mother was a French teacher turned stay-at-home mom. She graduated from Harvard, twice, and has worked in high-power jobs at the US Treasury, Google, and now Facebook. Industry types consider her a “rock star in business, politics, and popular culture, with unprecedented influence and reach.”3 She is worth more than a billion dollars and was listed at number six on the Forbes 2013 Most Powerful Women List, sandwiched between Hillary Clinton and Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund. Sandberg has been so successful at making Facebook profitable that companies want to clone her. Andreessen Horowitz, Facebook board member and cofounder of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm says of Sandberg: “Her name has become a job title. Every company we work with wants a Sheryl.”4
Feminist Ideals and Reality
The runaway success of Lean In and, more broadly, the resurgent interest in feminism in wealthy countries, stem from widespread frustration with the advancement of women. Though women in the United States have, roughly speaking, equal rights and access to education, nutrition, and health care as men, the picture for women is disappointing and progress has been slow and halting. Women outperform men in higher education but don’t achieve comparable levels of success or wealth. Decisions about balancing home life and work life are as fraught as ever as housing and childcare costs continue to climb. Women are still stereotyped or under-represented in the popular media—of the 100 highest-grossing 2012 films, only 28.4 percent of speaking characters were women. The backlash against women’s reproductive rights continues unabated, with states like Texas passing draconian abortion legislation. After a long, steady decline through the 1990s, rates of violence against women haven’t budged since 2005.
For poor women—especially women of color—the situation is far bleaker. Low wage, contingent, and precarious work remains dominated by women. As the income and wealth gap between the rich and poor yawns ever wider, women at the bottom seem to be disappearing from view. The Right doesn’t talk about “welfare queens” anymore because state safety net provisions have been all but eliminated and replaced by homeless shelters and food banks. Poor women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than wealthy women, prevented by poverty and isolation from escaping abusive relationships. A recent report showed that white, female high school dropouts have seen their life expectancy drop by five years over the past two decades.
When Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, most women, especially those with young children, worked only in the home. In the fifty years since then the situation has reversed. Today 60 percent of women work outside the home. Single and married mothers are even more likely to work, including 57 percent of mothers with children under the age of one. Yet women who work full time still earn only 81 percent of full-time male earnings. This disparity would actually be greater if men’s wages (aside from BA degree holders) had not fallen faster than women’s in recent years. The wage gap widens when women have children. Women in their early twenties make just over 90 percent of what their male counterparts take home. But between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four women’s relative pay takes a nosedive and continues to decline between thirty-five and forty-four. The divergence illustrates both the unbalanced effect of family care responsibilities and expectations on women and the dramatic effect of pricey childcare and inflexible work schedules on women’s earning power.5
Surprisingly, the widest pay gaps occur in professional and higher-paying jobs. While this elite job pay gap is in part the result of women “off-ramping” after having children, a significant component comes from gatekeeping and professional networks that keep women out of top jobs. When a female student at Harvard Business School asked William Boyce, co-founder of Highland Capital Partners, for tips on entering the venture capital field he laughed and said, “Don’t.” Boyce wasn’t just channeling Don Draper—he felt that he was doing the student a solid by letting her in on the secret that men in finance do not want female peers.6
While pay gaps are higher at the top, feminists like bell hooks argue that sexism and racism pervade all corners of society. Dominant narratives of power glorify white, heteronormative visions of life. From birth, boys and girls are treated differently. Assertive girls are called bossy and shamed for aggressive behavior while boys are expected to take charge. Girls are given dolls to play with while boys are given blocks and computer games. Gender stereotypes introduced in the home, school, and everyday life are perpetuated throughout women’s lives, shaping their identities and life choices. Men choose higher-paying science and math careers while women gravitate toward lower-paying, language-oriented professions.
At the societal level stereotypes intersect with material conditions to create a gendered, racialized division of labor. The retail, service, and food sectors—the center of new job growth—are dominated by women, and the feminization of “care” work is even more pronounced. Women make up 82 percent of elementary school teachers, 90 percent of nurses, 90 percent of housekeepers, 94 percent of child care workers, and 87 percent of personal care workers. In September 2013 President Obama extended the Fair Labor Standards Act to domestic workers (finally), and some states, like California, have passed a domestic worker bill of rights. Despite these significant steps forward, care work is still seen as women’s work and undervalued. Disproportionate numbers of caring jobs are low-paying, contingent gigs in which humiliation, harassment, assault, and wage theft are the norm.7
Are Women Their Own Worst Enemies?
All feminists recognize the systemic aspects of women’s subordination, but some, like Sheryl Sandberg, don’t believe that the laundry list of external barriers explains the persistent failure of women to take their rightful place as equal members of society. Sandberg argues that internal barriers are as critical, if not more critical, in explaining women’s lives and disappointments.
Betty Friedan exemplified this internal-barriers, get-tough message, and rocked the boat in a big way with her 1963 manifesto The Feminine Mystique. Writing near the end of the postwar boom, Friedan discovered that the feminist revolution wasn’t over and that women weren’t taking advantage of the choices available to them in life. She argued that women in her day often fell victim to “a mistaken choice” between being the “career woman—loveless, alone” or the “gentle wife and mother—loved and protected by her husband, surrounded by her adoring children.”8 According to Friedan, women were making the wrong choice. Young, educated, middle-class women willingly surrendered to domesticity rather than struggle through the rite-of-passage identity crisis that young men were destined to endure. “It is frightening to grow up finally and be free of passive dependence. Why should a woman bother to be anything more than a wife and mother if all the forces of
her culture tell her she doesn’t have to, will be better off not to, grow up?”9
In her characteristically bold prose Friedan argued that this surrender left a generation of (middle-class, suburban) women with half-formed identities, perpetually stunted and immature, and that domestic escapism often led to depression, bad parenting, adultery, alcoholism, and even suicide. The only way a woman could become a fully formed adult was to get an education and then passionately follow her intellectual interests to a career outside the home.
Sheryl Sandberg is in many respects extending the argument Friedan made, but instead of telling women to get out of the kitchen, Sandberg commands them to get out of the cubicle. She thinks women need to wake up and recognize the invisible, internal forces pushing them down the long, languid road to mediocrity. These internal barriers, while often ignored, are incredibly important, and unlike external barriers, “are under our own control.”10
Sandberg believes that women talk themselves out of taking power because they feel like frauds and doubt their own capabilities, and because they face resistance from a culture that penalizes “aggressive and hard-charging” women who “violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct.”11 Women worry so much about work/life balance and whether “having it all” (family and career) is really possible that they often give up before they have to, putting their foot on the brakes when they should be putting their foot on the gas. Women still face a “mistaken choice”:
The New Prophets of Capital Page 2