One Market under God
Thomas Frank
Secker £18.99, pp414
Buy it at a discount at BOL
There is something heroic, these days, about starting a little magazine. It suggests a reckless faith that amid all the conglomerate babble and virtual chat, you might still find an audience simply through the strength of ideas and the rhythm of writing.
Thomas Frank began editing The Baffler, a close-typed, self-funding, somewhat infrequent quarterly in 1988, from his home in Chicago. The magazine, which looked a little like something Tom Paine might have thumbed through by guttering candlelight, was the least fashionable of all possible things in America: a sustained, highly literate critique of the home-grown success story that was the New Economy, and the attendant nonsenses of the 'consumer revolution'.
Frank's take on market-led efficiencies was in some ways enshrined in his notes of guidance to potential contributors: 'No poetry... no faxes or emails... be prepared, in some cases, not to receive a response for months.' Still, in the dozen years since he began, he has honed his arguments about the state of the corporate soul to the extent that he is now expertly prepared to take on multinational all comers (along with the militia wing of their communications departments).
This book is, as a result, both a dazzling manifesto for the ragtag anticapitalist movement and an unassailable counterpoint to the smugness of the prevailing share-option élite. By casting the recent past into quasi-historical terms, Frank examines the forces that have shaped our technological economy.
He imagines a future generation looking back on the Nineties as the decade in which, for a handful of silver, Americans - and much of the rest of the developed world - destroyed 'the middle-class republic that [their] ancestors spent decades building... millions found themselves trapped in casual jobs with no benefits, but our shares did OK. A good education for our kids ascended out of our reach, but our position in Cisco paid off; our neighbourhoods collapsed and our industries decamped... we frittered away what little workplace power we had managed to achieve. Convinced that the internet "changed everything", we signed away some of our most basic rights as citizens.'
Along the way, he skewers, with a seductive mixture of wit and polemic, in particular the 'bullshit on wheels' of the management industry - based on 'anecdotes that prove nothing, of patently wrong syllogisms, of meaningless diagrams and homemade master narratives' - and the absurdist hypocrisy of the new, 'cool' plutocrats: 'chatting with the guys in the band and working on their poetry in Starbucks... abjuring stodgy ties and suits for 24/7 casual' while all the time building and protecting personal wealth on a previously unimaginable scale.
This is a voice - informed, angry, egalitarian - that has not often been heard in 'the American conversation' - as Tina Brown has it - for a couple of decades (20 years in which 10 per cent of the American population have come to own 70 per cent of the wealth, in which free market philosophy has assumed the trappings of fundamentalist religion, and in which executive compensation has grown, on average, to a staggering 475 times the amount paid to employees).
Frank is tormented by the implications of such figures. Unlike many commentators on the e-revolution, he refuses to be seduced into 'starstruck wonderment' at these sweater-wearing, hamburger-munching masters of the universe and the 'high quality of sex and luxuries they enjoy'. He holds a pin up to the Nasdaq bubble; he questions the received wisdom that all Americans can live lives 'pursuing percentage'; and his close reading of the history we have been sold reveals the precise, insidious ways in which unions became branded conservative and regressive forces, and the 'credential-hungry' executive class on their MBA programmes a force for progression.
The triumph of this book is that it achieves all of this without ever straying beyond concrete example into fanciful polemic. Frank listens to the lies told in the name of branding at an ad planners' convention on Madison Avenue (braving the tattooed and goateed and pierced 'agents of change' in a flannel suit and sensible shoes); and he commits himself to the unenviable task of practical crit-ing the self-help 'wisdom' of business school philosophers, purveyors of the CEO's new clothes.
Mired, as a result, in the tortured euphemisms - 'delayering' and 'outsourcing', 're-engineering' and 'disintermediating' - of 'change management', he holds the following truth to be self-evident: 'That the singlemost important point one needs to know to understand corporate thought in the Nineties [was that] top managers were enriched in proportion to the amount of power and security that workers lost.' As Tom Peters might have said, Thomas Frank steps outside the box in order to push the envelope into a cocked hat.
