Futures Forum: "Our naive innovation fetish"
The latest edition of the Baffler magazine looks at its birth - and its impact:
The Innovator’s Agenda
How the busiest of buzzwords was enlisted in the capitalist cause
IN 1959, A GROUP OF high school juniors in a Brooklyn classroom took a very bad quiz. The questions, written by a right-wing, pro-business lobbying group, were a mix of multiple-choice and true-false propositions on economic matters, like When a company makes big profits in any one year, it ought to raise wages. (Correct answer: false.) Or: Which of the following do you think should be government owned and operated? a) railroads b) automobile companies c) banks d) steel companies e) oil companies f) power companies or g) none of the above. (Correct answer: g.) Most students failed the quiz; the average score was 45 percent, but they didn’t appear to mind much. One student told the authors of the quiz that they represented “a stinking, reactionary organization.”
And so they did. The quiz was written by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), an organization founded in 1895 to fight organized labor and retooled in the 1930s as a leading opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. After World War II, NAM’s eager propagandists began developing free-market economics curricula for U.S. high schools, which they were convinced were hotbeds of pro-labor and communist sentiment. Written student feedback recorded in NAM’s files seemed to confirm those fears. A Brooklyn student wrote on the quiz:
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! Down with the capitalist exploiters. These ‘people’ do no work and expect to receive recompense for laziness. To paraphrase Lincoln, who in his second inaugural commented in much this way on slavery—‘the taskmaster wringing his bread from the sweat of another’s brow and the unrequited toil of millions of laborers.’ This system is contradictory to our ideals. The system must be abolished and the worker emancipated.
The results showed the NAM researchers the urgency of their mission. The honor students who flunked their economics quiz were some of the city’s most elite students, and yet, the NAM report concluded, they showed an exceptionally “high degree of economic illiteracy.” Teaching the youth of America to love the “free enterprise system” again would be a generational task.
Revolt of the Pikers
Looking back from the vantage point of neoliberal America circa 2019, it is striking (and a little cheering) to see the anguish of the defenders of private property at mid-century. In her 2009 book Invisible Hands, Kim Phillips-Fein showed how deeply the fall of the “employer’s paradise” of the 1920s shook the ruling class from the 1930s onward, as workers struck and organized and the public mood turned against industry. By the 1950s, right-wing writers complained that socialists still set the terms of debate and commanded the language of the economy: “55% hold to the Marxist theory ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,’” according to the NAM’s report on American teenagers during the Eisenhower era. Their schoolbooks uniformly “make the employer look like a piker,” lamented the head of the group’s education department. “We have not learned to speak our own economic language as well as the other fellow has learned his specious patter,” wrote Wilbur Brons in the Chicago Journal of Commerce in 1944. Things were so bad in 1950 that Pierre S. du Pont, scion of the Delaware chemical dynasty and one of America’s richest men, felt himself to be living a kind of tragedy. “Perhaps,” he wrote wistfully to a colleague, “we were born too soon.”
Exiting the social-democratic nightmare meant, in part, learning, and teaching, a new language. The socialistic shibboleths of “security,” “planning,” “economic democracy,” and “full employment” would have to be confronted and countered with new ideals of competition and entrepreneurship. People like the Brooklyn high school juniors had learned, through years of Depression and war, to associate freedom with security from the thing called “the market,” in its various manifestations: a cruel boss, a closed factory gate, a sped-up assembly line. To redeem the free enterprise system, the apostles of private property needed a vocabulary for emancipation through the market. To do this, they needed to make the market the sort of misty abstraction you could never confuse with the “sweat of another’s brow.” If only Pierre du Pont could have known how popular “innovation” would one day become.
Change Agents
One of innovation’s earliest and most cogent modern definitions, in the economic usage that we’ve wearily come to know so well, comes from Joseph Schumpeter. The Harvard economist saw innovation in 1942 as “the entrepreneurial function.” To innovate meant:
to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.
He wrote elsewhere that “innovations are always associated with the rise to leadership of New Men,” which pinpoints one of the major paradoxes of the term: its simultaneously functional and utopian usages. That is, the process of innovation—Schumpeter famously called it “creative destruction”—is both a workaday managerial process and also a kind of heroic eruption of market-shaping genius. The ubiquity of the term today may make us think of high-tech abundance, or perhaps the “better living through chemistry” that twentieth-century American firms like DuPont long promised consumers of plastics and nylons. But now, of course, the idea of innovation—less moored to material things than chemistry was—reigns supreme in Silicon Valley, the world’s “most innovative neighborhood,” as a typical description in the business press goes. “Chemistry” implied, at some point in the process, the production of a material object; tech innovation celebrates the decisions of the manager in his office
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Back here in the actually existing social world, though, the widespread circulation of the innovation ideal allows us to employ it as a sort of marker to track the major distinguishing features of contemporary capitalist ideology: its celebration of knowledge, rather than labor, as the driving force of the world economy; its ostensible disdain for hierarchy and bureaucracy; its unskeptical celebration of technology; and its reframing of the loss of job “security” as the laudable increase of “flexibility.” The innovator who emerges from this complex history is a contradictory figure defined by an oscillation between what seem like contradictory poles: imagination and production, rebellion and convention, progress and reaction, the common good and private wealth. These paradoxes, too, are part of the idea’s power, since the underlying vagueness of innovation-for-innovation’s sake permits it to mean all things to all people. It cultivates the open-ended creativity typically identified with the artist, and turns it to profit-making ends, and cultivates it in large firms; it is the twenty-first century’s theory of progress, but it is a heroism of office work. It is a theory of novelty that is perpetually repeating itself. And in its political origins, it is a theory of the new for those outraged by the New Deal.
Its current power shows, however, that the leaders of NAM were on to something. To change the way people think about capitalism, you have to start with how they talk about it.
The Innovator’s Agenda | John Patrick Leary
See also:
Futures Forum: Creating/destroying jobs >>> Creative Destruction and Artificial Intelligence
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