Rushkoff’s Life Inc.
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Now this is a fairly explosive one, and it should be stated up front that it is just one side of a much much more complicated story which the author is leaving out (including lots of good parts). But it’s one side that is radically missing from American political, social, and economic discourse. Take it for that much and not the final end all truth. (Website for the book here.)
While Rushkoff’s criticism has echoes of The Frankfurt School (Marcusse especially) as well as a more updated Neo-Frankfurt/New Left critique (e.g. Naomi Klein), it thankfully doesn’t recommend Neo-Keynesianism as a solution–like Klein’s Shock Doctrine book did. In that sense it might qualify for what friend of the blog Nathan Origer promotes as left-conservatism.
A libertarianism that is still held too deeply to a Friedman-ite Monetarism and the Bank Monopoly system on which it is predicated strikes me as pretty weak brew. I think Rushkoff’s focus on complementary currencies is the only real way to create a libertarianism/localism with any teeth. Otherwise in very broad strokes, alternative currency-less and alternative communitarian-less libertarianism generally favors I think a court-heavy focus on Nanny State-ism (trans fats bans & the like) and lifestyle choices (e.g. drug decriminalization). Might just be me but those have never been the rallying cries for me. In other words, in our never-ending [and never ceasing to drive Mark crazy :)] debate here at the League about pure libertarianism and whether it’s ever existed or not, my argument is that any such thing can’t really come to be absent a creation of wealth outside of the banking system.
In other other words, in trying to understand where I come from on all this, one way I think about this is that liberalism (rule of law, separation of value sphere from governance) is the worst form of governance there is–until as Churchill said you study all the rest. Liberalism had to create the necessary fiction of separate individuals for political purposes since humans up to that point had not yet evolved to live with one another in community without making a complete violent mess of it. However that fiction became to be believed as a or even the real thing itself. A real saving thing–utilitarian ethics, individualist ethos, making it ideology–all flow from taking the idea of fictive separate self as a real thing. And to the degree it merged with a corporatist economy….well, then the problems never cease.
Since Rushkoff is aiming his fire at the core corporatist element and its inherent and intrinsic collusion with and dependence on the state, this critique cuts across the left/right spectrum of US discourse. The American left being still too largely optimistic about the power of the state–whether via monetary redistribution, bailouts, (temporary?) takeovers, public investment, and/or regulatory frameworks. The right being dominated by corporate power (not the least of which being military corporate power) and the lack of a real response to the economic crises of middle/lower classes in the global age (possible exception here).
I’ve gone down this road before arguing the need is not for a third party but rather for a third leg to the stool (The Commons). As applied to this discussion, The Commons creates wealth not banks. Which is why I agree 100% with his point on the banking industry (let it die) and have since the beginning. Banks basically need to become public utility and consultant businesses and lose their government enforced monopoly on the creation of wealth debt.]
For those reasons and many more, I think, it’s worth a listen and more importantly some seriously deep reflection.
Rushkoff’s comment that the Renaissance was the “end of a golden age” brought to mind Ignatius J. Reilly. His yellowed seamen stained sheets. His Big Chief tablets strewn about his room, full of his thoughts concerning the heights of civilization being reached during the eleventh century papacy.
Count me as one that will not buy his theory or book.Report
yeah like I said it’s one-sided. It’s too romantic towards the Middle Ages and too critical of the Renaissance era. Both are much more good & bad mixed. Still I think his tracing of the corporation from that era to ours and asking why in the world we still work under this fiction–like the nonsense that the corporation is a legal individual? Why do we do this and expect different results than we have gotten for the last five hundred years? Namely more and more power held in the hands of the plutocracy? On that front, I think he’s got a point.Report
I only know what you posted. I’m not enough of a historian to be certain but it seems as though he has never heard of Venice, Genoa, or the Netherlands. I hope his book is a lot better than this short flogging of it indicates.Report
Indeed, it can be easy to over-romanticize the pre-Renaissance era (think Chesterton, for instance) but then again it can be even easier and more widely acceptable to simply assume that because Reason and Science were good things that everything else that evolved out of that era and into this modern era were also equally good. I think the critique of corporatism is very timely. Whether people were “more” human previously I’m not sure is quite so obvious. I think share-farmers and peasants are hardly models of what we should strive for. But that is too simplistic. We are placing modern corporatism and individualism up against pre-modern peasantry. What about a different modernism altogether that eschews both?Report
It’s “Marcuse,” and what does Klein have to do with the Frankfurt school?Report
Klein’s No Logo owed a great deal I think to the Frankfurt School. She could be considered New Left though she is more Keynesian in economics. Still she is deeply influenced by Humanist Marxism (through her parents for one).
Her globalization critiques owe a great deal to the attacks on mass capitalism and what the Frankfurt-ers called “Spectator society.”
Where she differs is that for the early Frankfurt School FDR’s New Deal was really another in some ways more invidious form of control. As it appeared democratic and liberal but was just another form of social exploitation. Klein I would say applies the Frankfurt School critique to Neo-Liberalism/Globalization but not New Deal-ism.Report
I was wondering if you guys were going to discuss this here! As soon as I started reading excerpts from it, I could see that the central ideas of the book have a lot of commonality with those proposed and discussed here, particularly in regards to localism. I’m reading the book right now, and so far I’m in agreement with you and E.D. on the strengths and weaknesses of Doug’s argument.
(I read this post a while back, when it was first put up, but I wanted to get farther along in the book itself before commenting.)
Two points I want to make right now are:
1.) As someone who’s been an admirer of Rushkoff’s ideas and a member of his discussion listserv for years, I think you can trace a district throughline to the ideas in Life Inc in all of his books (even the one about Judaism) since Coercion, which was written partly in response to how his ideas in Media Virus were corrupted and co-opted by corporate marketing. (I particularly recommend the former, which combines psychology and the Frankfurt School-derived ideas you noted with his McLuhan-influenced theories about media ecology, to provide a handy guide to understanding and defending against the manipulative techniques used in advertising, “marketing”, etc. without getting bogged down like Klein in “movement” politics.)
2.) I too noticed some of the parallels to Naomi Klein, as did The Guardian, but I think – beyond his rejection of neo-Keyesianism (and really the whole of macro-economics in general) as part and parcel of corporatism – he also has a much better grasp of just how deep this ideology goes in modern society. Klein, I think, fundamentally misunderstood neoliberalism, and as such implied connections that were not there to compensate for missing those that were. The Shock Doctrine conflated it with neoconservatism in an attempt to explicate the colonialist undertones of both. Rather than accusing monetarist libertarians of maliciously enabling things like the Iraq war, as Klein does, he points out that the typical libertarian critique of state power misses the forest for the trees, assuming corporations and modern finance as natural outgrowths of a free market, rather than the freedom-limiting, wealth-extracting state impositions that they actually are. (And he is, of course, also very critical of the New Deal and spinoff agencies – particularly the racist and anti-social policies of the Federal Housing Administration).Report
jfm,
thanks for the lucid comment and the recommendation. i’ll put it in more cue for books to read. The clarification between his work and Klein I think is very helpful.Report