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CHAPTER 1

The transformation of global capitalism

The revolution that began with machines and chemicals proposes now to continue with automation, computers, and biotechnology. That this has been and is a revolution is undeniable. It has not been merely a "scientific revolution" as its proponents like to call it, but also an economic one, involving great and profound changes in property ownership and the distribution of wealth.

Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

What excites us is some sort of technological revolution: the fossil fuel revolution, the automotive revolution, the assembly line revolution, the antibiotic revolution, the sexual revolution, the computer revolution ... the genomic revolution, and so on. But these revolutions – all with something to sell that people or their government "must" buy – are mere episodes of the one truly revolutionary revolution in the history of the human race: the Industrial Revolution, which has proceeded from the beginning with only two purposes: to replace human workers with machines, and to market its products, regardless of their usefulness or their effects, at the highest possible profit – and so to concentrate wealth into even fewer hands.

Wendell Berry, Our Only World

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 can now be perceived as a watershed moment — a political event that signified a passage from one order of things to the next — in which we can now see the origins of our current predicament. At this moment we can retroactively see the emerging disintegration of the compact that had been forged between labor, capital, and the state throughout the postwar decades; a pact that in many ways defined the extended period of sustained economic growth during this same era:

During the period from 1945 to 1975 the product of economic activity was distributed through collective bargaining mechanisms, which, despite being hard to implement at times, were for the most part effective ...

And then, how this very disintegration eventually gave birth to the neoliberal age: the age of mass privatization, deregulation, planetary militarism, and the dominance of a financially-based global capitalism:

... That model, which was based on state and union mediation, was demolished. Redistributive capacity was brought to a halt and wiped out. Today, with the cancerous growth of finance, we've got a predatory capitalism, doomed to constant crisis because of its relentless headlong rush forward, driven by increasingly uncontrollable financial instruments.

Perhaps the signature feature that can account for the difference in how the economy functions in the present versus how it operated prior to the neoliberal turn in the 1980s is in its relationship to financial markets. As economist Rana Forohoor has demonstrated, financial markets have become akin to a virus within the twenty-first century global economy; continually soaking up value from real production without reinvesting back into it:

To understand how we got here, you have to understand the relationship between capital markets — meaning the financial system — and businesses. From the creation of a unified national bond and banking system in the U.S. in the late 1790s to the early 1970s, finance took individual and corporate savings and funneled them into productive enterprises, creating new jobs, new wealth, and ultimately, economic growth ...

Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses.

In other words, the American economy has become successively financialized over the past decades. The national economy now orbits around globalized financial markets and complex monetary instruments as opposed to being grounded in the day to day economic life of industrial production, family farming, small businesses, and most importantly — local sensibility and local economies. Financial markets no longer work in concert and support the operation and growth of the productive business sector. Instead, they now have become a world unto themselves; subject to esoteric laws and complicated trading algorithms, and utterly divorced from the real-life struggles of ordinary global citizens.

Although this shift has been undoubtedly exasperated by ideological factors — a thorough reconditioning of our common sense thinking that has made us progressively devalue the importance of our public resources and spaces, collective bargaining, and social institutions for a thinking that centers more and more around personal identity, competition, and the ability of individuals to gain direct market access — it is also a shift that has been deeply shaped by technology. The dawn of the neoliberal age can also be seen as the period in which a whole range of technologies — global networks, the digital medias, and a whole series of new productive technologies such as mass automation and the collection of big data — would be introduced into consumer markets and radically transform both the function and structure of the previous socioeconomic order: the shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism in Western economies.

The period of industrial capitalism dealt with, first and foremost, the intersection of mechanical modes of production and the labor performed by human bodies — as in the sweat of muscles performing work in the factory or on the docks of any major port city (or in the case of the white-collar version, the organizational work model once favored by the mid-twentieth century American corporation: rows of cubicles and the figure of the "grey-suited man" who crunched his endless numbers day in and day out). This was a period that was demarcated by the presence of large centralized institutions, hierarchical bureaucracies, and organized spaces of production. What the election of Ronald Reagan can now be seen to have represented is simply the emerging breakdown, the impending implosion, of this very socioeconomic framework. Industrial-based capitalism could no longer operate in American society when exposed to both the ideological force of neoliberalism — individuality over solidarity; passive consumption in lieu of active citizenship — and the decentralizing power of networked technologies. The once centralized core functions of the office building or the assembly line have been outsourced to foreign shores while labor in the information age has become mobile, precarious, and scattered among individual global players.

We can see this transformation most clearly in how the notion of work itself has been so thoroughly transformed in the past decades by the effects of neoliberalism: instead of using the worker's muscle it uses his or her brain; instead of using the sweat from the worker's brow it now uses the far limits of his or her emotional and creative potential; and instead of producing a range of serialized commodities on the assembly line it produces the flexible networks, the personalized advertising, and the simulated imagery central to the twenty-first century consumer experience.

But what has also been transformed is the very way in which work is perceived. In the era of industrial capitalism work was often viewed as a type of death sentence: a 9–5 shift that was regarded as fundamentally inhuman; a period of the day that was barely tolerated by the worker in the factory or office building and was only performed in exchange for a set wage. Work was not glamorized; it was not seen as being a way to express one's creative potential.

Today, however, that perception of labor has definitely changed. Because labor has become ever more specialized and fragmented in today's postindustrial economy, the worker more and more considers his job to be the most important part of his life: work has become ideologically reconstituted in the postindustrial economy as the signature place where one's emotional, creative, and intellectual potentials can be fully put to use. Today work is largely regarded as the place where one can most directly contribute to the betterment of society, which is almost the exact opposite of how work was perceived in the industrial era — where it was often seen as an alienating, exploitive exercise that was only tolerated for a wage.

But there is another feature that can further describe the transformation of the perception of labor in the age of neoliberal globalization. That is, the fact that today virtually our entire range of experiences as human beings — our social, cultural, even our spiritual experiences — are now comprehensively exposed to the logic of networked technologies. In other words, within our present era of postindustrial capitalism, both the forces of economic production and the majority of our social interactivity are more and more centered in the virtual sphere. What is thus depleted in this scenario — from the constant bombardment of content within our social media feeds, the precariousness of work when integrated into the flux of global networks — is, essentially, the "real world." One only needs to walk into a cafe in any major American city today to see this phenomenon clearly demonstrated: a coffee shop full of human bodies staring at their screens and communicating within the virtual realm in lieu of their immediate environment.

Our lives in the postindustrial era have been exponentially transferred to the screen for two interrelated reasons. The first is that labor itself has ceased to be physical. It has ceased to be a formula of timed work shifts in which human bodies operate machinery or perform a set of repetitive duties within a hierarchical office bureaucracy. Work has now become an exercise of cognitive labor that is more and more focused on the specialized intellectual and creative capabilities of individualized information workers. And, as a direct result of that shift, work for the individual becomes increasingly precarious, increasingly absent of any social protections such as long-term pensions and basic health care, while being increasingly deprived of its capacity to promote solidarity with other workers: contrary to the common assumption that in the digital era we are becoming ever more connected with each other; in actuality, we are retreating further and further into our private fantasies and our disconnected worlds.

The second reason — as we have already mentioned being a direct result of the ideological effects of neoliberalism — is that the primary way the individual now asserts their identity, the primary way an individual now demonstrates his or her identity is through work itself. That is to say, because our community and civic life becomes increasingly barren, because our social relationships become more and more of a public spectacle designed to get likes and shares, the shift of our collective creative energies are transferred toward our ultra-personalized labor and individualized economic productivity: in the age of neoliberal globalization work becomes our life and our life becomes work:

... as the traditional world of work is integrated into networked technology, the boundaries between work life and personal life become indistinguishable; work space and work time are intermingled with their private, personal counterparts. These novelties allow workers to bring their personal, lifeworld qualities of creativity, intimate relationships, and deep personal engagement to bear on their work activities ...

Although it may seem on the surface that this shift (as opposed to the seemingly cold, rote labor on the assembly line) is a positive and progressive one, it is nevertheless proving to be not the case.

When work becomes our entire identity, subject to market laws and abstract technological mediation, what then becomes of our flesh, our relationships, our home, and our local communities?

One can only note that they become progressively deprived of their life affirming energy. And with that, any potential cultural and social activity not inscribed by the logic of global capitalism, and the objective power of networked technologies becomes increasingly difficult to produce and sustain.

So, in the neoliberal era we can thus see two distinct shifts that have been brought forth by the transformation of global capitalism since the Reagan years: the financialization of the economy and the virtualization of our social and personal life.

It is interesting to note that it is within this very socioeconomic transformation that Reality Television becomes a cultural phenomenon; where a medium such as Reality Television suddenly becomes so visible in our day to day lives. We are in a situation today where all forms of technology are progressing with such astonishing speed, where technology is becoming ever more animated and sentient, that it is leaving our actual lived experience increasingly fragmented, isolated, and empty: because our embodied experience in the "real world" becomes so boring and stagnant, it migrates to our television sets and to the screens of our various devices. Reality Television, live streaming, and 24/7 social media engagement thus become emblematic of our lives under the force of neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century.

In a certain respect, with the premiere and subsequent wide success of The Apprentice in 2004, Donald Trump has become emblematic of this precise paradigmatic shift. The Apprentice was a watershed moment that can now be seen as a program that signifies the very transformation that we are thus far attempting to highlight: the migration of social life to the virtual realm and economic production to the financial realm. In other words, Donald Trump himself is symbolic of this same collective transformation of our lives, our culture, and our economy.

I think this is where people fundamentally underestimate Donald Trump: yes, he's boorish, crude, and often displays a shocking lack of policy acumen and sense of historical context when addressing the American public. But in terms of his purely intuitive understanding of the global media's progression in the age of digital networks and Reality Television, in his capacity to effectively grasp the evolution of the twenty-first century pop-cultural and political domain, he is nothing short of genius. It is without question that the phenomenal emergence of Reality Television and the wide success of The Apprentice dramatically elevated Trump's presence in American culture. The endless circulation of his image and signature rhetorical memes — "You're fired!" — helped bring forth a scenario in which his phantasmagorical presence seemed to somehow always be lurking in the background of American culture.

But it is not only the fact that Donald Trump has grasped the ongoing metamorphosis of twenty-first century media practices far better than the national news outlets and the class of professional pundits that arrogantly dismissed his campaign from the very beginning; he can also be regarded as an archetypal symbol of the very metamorphosis he has so effortlessly comprehended: the very image of Trump is now indicative of our own era — the era of digital news feeds, unfettered global capitalism, and the emergent phenomenon of fake news.

But this very transformation, in which the cultural and political rise of Donald Trump bears witness too, is also emblematic of a deeper shift that is now bringing forth the makings of a new global order. It is an order in which the virtual takes precedence over the real, where financial capitalism displaces concrete forms of production, and where marketing, branding, and slogans become more important than the product or service they are attempting to sell.

Donald Trump has understood from the very beginning of his career as a Manhattan real estate developer — and well before the emergence of the world wide web in the 1990s and the medium of Reality Television that followed shortly thereafter — the power of branding and the power of the image. Yes, it is true that Donald Trump is a real estate developer who oversees the transformation of "real" materials such as steel and concrete into skyscrapers and luxury hotels in cities across the globe. However, he is also well aware that today the most important feature of a newly constructed skyscraper's "reality" is not the steel or concrete, but rather the branding and imagery that it is associated with. In short: Donald Trump knows that the domain of the image, the realm of the sign, and the size of your net worth displayed upon a computer screen have come to be the all-important features of life in the era of postindustrial capitalism.

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Excerpted from "The Meaning of Trump"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brian Francis Culkin.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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