When “Market Man” Consigns the Common Man to the Dustbin of History
July 28, 2011
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
PART I: “We’re All Entrepreneurs Now…”
Introduction
It’s very hard not to be mesmerized by the dispiriting spectacle now underway in the nation’s capital, with the sans-culottes of capitalism, the Republican Right, dictating terms to the President and the Democratic Party while holding them hostage under the ceilings of debt. What the Right proposes doesn’t surprise us so much; we’ve been students of these revolutionaries for three decades now. What is amazing is watching President Obama and far too much of the Democratic Party be willing to give them 80% of what they want. The President has made it very clear where he thinks the American left can go; in convincing us that we have no future in a Democratic Party that has turned its back on its own best traditions, ones that are still badly needed, and relevant for meeting the current crisis in our economic institutions. What’s happening in the summer of 2011, the fixation on debts and deficits, is so tragic because it obscures the fact that the old Washington “consensus” between the Right and the Center, going back to Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presently has no answer for the nation’s unemployment and foreclosure calamities. These in turn are rooted in deep changes in the nature of international finance, trade and labor markets, and the high levels of private citizens’ debts, which were already swelling before the financial crisis, the debts being a form of compensatory consolation for the middle and working class’s stagnating wages. The crisis cannot be solved without a return to full employment, and the truth is the current economic arrangements can’t deliver anything remotely like it. Had the “grand bargain” been signed off on, we would still be staring at the great, radical experiment of the Right, acquiesced in by the Center, their fondest wish ever since they rose up to fight FDR in the latter half of the 1930’s: they will meet the deep troughs that capitalism historically sinks under by further shrinking the size of government and balancing budgets at all levels, and placing all human faith in the divinity of private markets. This essay looks at some of the current columns of one of the great cheerleaders for these economic arrangements which have caused such a calamity, Thomas L. Friedman of Bethesda, MD, as well as two of his longer and more famous works from the past ten years. As the title suggests, we are going to look at the role assigned to, and the likely fate of, the “common man” in these new labor markets, so well represented by the rise of Wal-Mart. When the French Revolution lost its mind, Edmund Burke gave the world a deep explanation for why it happened with his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and when that proved to be too much of an apology for the Ancien Regime, Thomas Paine gave him, and all of us, a spirited reply with The Rights of Man, just one year later, in 1791. What we claim in this essay is that Mr. Friedman has been celebrating the emergence of a “Market Man” who has been “designed” to meet a new revolutionary situation: the frantic demands of globalization and the utopian effort to construct one giant “free-market.” If one pays close attention to Friedman’s metaphors and parables for this “new man” caught up in the “revised” labor markets, as well as his prescriptions for pushing the older human types out of the way – as suggested by his remedy for unemployment – that we all become “start-ups” – it will become apparent that this is going to be more of a nightmare than a dream about human fulfillment.
