Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

Language (n.) The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Language, Ambrose Bierce tells us, cannot be trusted, and the sweeter it sounds, the less we should trust it. This is a book about words and their deceptions. The words in this book make up the twenty-first century language of capitalism, a metaphorically rich vernacular in which the defenders of private property speak of virtues and vision, where wage laborers become imaginative artists and agile athletes, and workplaces are transformed into vibrant ecologies and nurturing communities. In this language, the differences between creative resistance to capitalism and creative capitalism, health care and wellness, rebellion and disruption, and working-class power and the commercial slogan of empowerment can be difficult to grasp. These keywords are what Bierce might call charming words used to deprive others of their treasure: if we understood them better, perhaps we might rob them of their seductive power.

Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism is a field guide to the capitalist present, an era of unprecedented technological possibilities to bring humanity together—so we are regularly told, anyway—that also features privation on a scale comparable to Bierce’s late nineteenth-century Gilded Age. Are we living in a new stage of capitalism, though, or are today’s digital technologies just a different version of our ancestors’ railroads and six-shooters, our Silicon Valley titans just the newest update to the ketchup and steel tycoons of an earlier, east-coast fantasy of wealth and opportunity? Identifying what makes our moment unique (or not) is no easy task, in part because we are living in it, and in part because the language we have to understand and describe our era’s inequality is itself one of the instruments of perpetuating it. How can we think and act critically in the present when the very medium of the present, language, constantly betrays us?

One way to address this question is to go to the words themselves—to their histories and their present-day semantics. Take innovation, today’s most popular term for the faith in perpetual improvement that in Bierce’s day would have been called progress. Long before it was any of the many things it is now taken to be—"the entrepreneurial function, an elusive quality of successful organizations, the objective of the American educational system—it was widely regarded as a dangerous vice. For centuries, it was condemned as the heresy of conspirators and false prophets—innovators upon the word of God. In a multitude of men there are many who, supposing themselves wiser than others, endeavour to innovate, Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651, and divers Innovators innovate divers wayes, which is a meer distraction, and civill ware. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the King speaks of fickle changelings and poor discontents gaping at the news of hurly-burly innovation. A century later, Edmund Burke thundered that the innovators of revolutionary Paris leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal."¹

The twentieth century saw a wholesale renovation of innovation’s slimy reputation. Its twenty-first century association with computing technology means that it no longer connotes religious zeal like it once did; nor is innovation any longer a prohibited individual action, committed by dissidents and heretics. Instead, it is a pragmatic, benevolent process, practiced by individuals but also nurtured by organizations and even by nations. Universities, software corporations, toy makers, museums, banks, pharmaceutical corporations, and soap conglomerates all claim to cultivate and pursue innovation. In the United States government, the importance and goodness of innovation is an issue of bipartisan consensus—embraced with equal alacrity by both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Despite this mainstream acceptance and its current association with technology, innovation retains some of its old link to rebellion and prophecy, as the term’s use in the business media and popular advertising shows. Break rules and dream is rule #1 of Silicon Valley’s "ecosystem of innovation, writes one venture capitalist in a column entitled, appropriately enough, The Seven Commandments of Silicon Valley." The innovators celebrated in mainstream politics and business are revolutionaries in skinny jeans, visionary personalities whose brilliance can, by some alchemy, be cultivated and reproduced by the same bureaucracies that, we often simultaneously think, tend to stifle idiosyncratic brilliance. This paradoxical combination of heroic anti-orthodoxy and process-driven orthodoxy makes innovation a virtue of a contradictory age. We live in an era in which an apocalyptic imagination holds sway in our cinemas, television shows, video games, and political campaigns, when the slow-motion disasters of debt and climate change imperil the futures of an entire generation of young people around the world. But it is also a historical moment distinguished, especially in the United States, by a powerful elite’s faith in the power of technology, and the innovators who wield it, to overcome almost any obstacle. Complex social problems borne of inequality can be solved with technical solutions, and if you learn the skills to master a hyper-competitive economy, you can make it. Need a job? Invent one, suggests Thomas Friedman, that reliable transcriber of ruling-class hobbyhorses, in one of his New York Times columns. In a world and an economy rent and ravaged by other people’s innovations, the lesson seems to be that you can, and must, creatively fend for yourself. Hobbes might have called this state of affairs the war of all against all; we just call it innovation and entrepreneurship.²

Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism uses the vocabulary of contemporary capitalism to chronicle this state of affairs and the culture of moralistic exhortation that conditions our responses to it as workers, students, citizens, and consumers. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be entrepreneurs and leaders, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies. Like innovation, many of these words have a secret history that informs their modern usage in surprising ways. Others, like best practices and human capital, are relatively new coinages that teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. And they all model a kind of ideal personality: someone who is indefatigable, restless, and flexible, always ready to accommodate the shocks of the global economy and the more mundane disruptions of working life, from unpredictable scheduling in service work to reduced parental leave and the outsourcing of more and more administrative tasks to fewer and fewer employees. These keywords share an affinity for hierarchy and competition, an often-uncritical acceptance of the benevolence of computing technologies, and a celebration of moral values thought to be indistinguishable from economic ones: decisive leadership, artistic passion, and self-realization. Wealth and professional success are consequences not of fortunate birth, dumb luck, or exploitation, but hard work, hustle, and grit. Because the words in this book have successfully infiltrated everyday life in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, their meanings often seem self-evident. Uncovering the history and false promises of the language of contemporary capitalism is the objective of this book.

WHAT’S IN A WORD?

A keyword, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafer the OED), is a word serving as a key to a cipher or the like. In his 1976 classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the Welsh literary critic Raymond Williams laid out the foundational vocabulary of modern British society in a wide-ranging project of critical historical semantics. He defined keywords as binding words in certain activities and their interpretation, elements of a living vocabulary that shape and reflect a society in movement. Keywords show what knowledge ties this society together, and how this common knowledge changes over time. As both Williams and the OED make clear, keywords are therefore key in a double sense: they are important, and they unlock something hidden. One of the most important of Williams’s keywords, hegemony, is an example of his thesis. As he defines it, hegemony shows us how the interests of a ruling class become the commonsense of others. Hegemony, he argues, comes to depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interests of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as ‘normal reality’ or ‘commonsense’ by those in practice subordinated to it.³ Williams’s point about hegemony in particular can be expanded to apply to most of his keywords and mine. That is, the critical study of language and its use can show us not just what a dominant worldview is, but how that worldview comes to feel like normal reality. Many of the books inspired by Williams’s project have, like this one, refined or broadened his original lexicon in various ways—for example, to focus on the keywords of a particular field of study, or to expand his roster of terms beyond the reference points of the British left of the mid-1970s. But for the most part, his chosen words are distinguished by their staying power.⁴ Tradition, culture, humanity, and community are not going anywhere, even as their meanings and uses have changed over time. The words in my collection are generally more specific to the contemporary political moment. They can also be understood as blockages—that is, they are the words we use when we aren’t calling things by their proper name. Williams’s collection has management and labor; this one has leadership and human capital.

Many of the words to follow come from what we might broadly describe as office work, whether it is the language used by the human-resources manager, the aspirational founder, or the white-collar proletarian whose clerical labors make the office go. This selection may reflect a professional bias on my part: I first encountered many of the words in this collection through my own white-collar job as an English professor in a midwestern public university, a circumstance that may also explain the number of education examples in the pages to follow. However, the managerial tenor of the terms in this book also reflects the way that capitalist ideology renders labor invisible, just as it has always done. It also makes hard, underpaid, repetitious, and insecure work seem palatable by framing it as intellectual, under the sign of what is often called a knowledge economy driven by individual cognitive skills like creativity. The keywords of contemporary capitalism fall into four broad categories. The first category we can call late-capitalist body talk. These are words like brand, flexible, nimble, lean, and robust, which draw on the human body as a metaphor for the corporation—itself already a bodily metaphor, deriving from the Latin corpus, or body— and which, in turn, frame our labors as an athletic contest governed by fair and transparent rules. Another group exemplifies the moral vocabulary of late capitalism, which as we shall see often draws on religious forebears to justify itself: the enigmatic virtues of innovation, entrepreneurship, resilience, passion, and human capital assure us that economic success is nothing less than a moral virtue. A third, related category describes the aesthetics of late capitalism, which posits the artist or craftsperson as a model for the modern worker: artisanal, collaboration, creativity, curator, and maker fit this bill. This category reflects the influence of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the artistic critique of capitalism, and its appropriation by capitalists themselves. Emerging out of the counterculture of the 1960s, which derided the inauthenticity of work under capitalism, the artistic critique of capitalism demanded autonomy, purpose, and transgression—things that workers are now counselled to seek in their jobs. Finally, the fourth category, which deals with the possibilities of technology, includes words like data and hack, words often used to signal to us that we live in a world with more possibilities than there’s ever been, as a recent credit card commercial bewilderingly claimed. These categories obviously overlap. Many of the bodily metaphors call upon workers’ physical and moral strength. Economic uses of creativity draw upon that word’s link to moral character and artistic work, and privatized social media platforms are usually advertised as ways of bringing people together.⁵

One feature these terms all share is their broad circulation both in mass media and in specialist discussions of working life and the economy. That is, they are not buzzwords, which I take to be novel, often disposable coinages whose ideological content may be easier to detect and which, therefore, do not infiltrate normal reality as insidiously. Nor is this a simple catalog of office jargon, for this reason and one other—while many of these words might slide most readily from the lips of a management consultant, they describe practices of surveillance and labor discipline that also shape assembly-line work, retail jobs, so-called sharing-economy gigs, and even life outside of work. Lean, for example, originated in automobile manufacturing, and so-called flexible scheduling organizes working life for retail employees. Terms like personal brand are used to express managerial power, but they also belong to the language of middle-class striving and fear, sold as a kind of security to office workers vulnerable to outsourcing and layoffs. And while many of these keywords are disseminated from comfortable perches at the Wall Street Journal or the Harvard Business Review, they are also at home among liberal politicians, idealist students, artists, and NGO directors. The meaning of some terms, like innovation or collaboration, may seem innocuous, the value of creativity and sharing self-evident, the worthiness of choice and smart unquestionable. Who, after all, would prefer fewer choices or a dumber mobile phone? But this is how the penetration of market discipline into the most quotidian aspects of our everyday lives comes to feel normal. For working adults and young children, at home, at school, at play, and even in church, we are called at all times to be at work building an entrepreneurial self ready to face a world that has little place for an increasing number of us.

The Soviet linguist Valentin Voloshinov, whose 1929 work Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was an important source for Williams’s study, regarded language as a terrain of social conflict in which it is an ideological battlefield as well as an archive of past political struggles. Writing of the dynamism and vitality of language—what he calls its multi-accentuality—Voloshinov describes the way our everyday speech collects the meanings of other speakers, or social accents, in our own moment and in previous generations. According to Voloshinov, the speakers of a dominant, authoritative accent compete with other overlooked, misunderstood, or silenced voices. Some accents may fade and be forgotten as they give way to new usages, he wrote, but inasmuch as they are remembered by the philologist and the historian, they may be said to retain the last glimmers of life.⁶ Obviously, glimmers of life and unheard social accents take us into somewhat speculative territory. The essays that follow are examples of historically-minded literary interpretation, rather than empirical documentation or formal linguistics. I make no claims to the actual persistence, whatever that might mean, of innovation’s formerly theological accents in its new economic meaning, nor of the glimmers of the Catholic martyr’s passion that haunt the word’s present-day use to describe a thorough commitment to work. All I can say is that I hear them.

A word on my sources: the definitions, etymological data, and examples of usage in the Oxford English Dictionary make it the indispensable resource for any student of the English language, and each of these essays relies upon it. Google’s ngram database of printed books has allowed me to visualize broad trends in word usage and popularity. The Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Corpus of Historical American English, developed by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University and hosted at https://corpus.byu.edu, allow users to trace developments in the frequency and usage of words in print. For business usage, publications like Forbes.com and the Harvard Business Review are reliable sources. Outside of the business press, I rely on the archive of the New York Times for much of the popular journalistic usage I trace here, given that the paper of record is a good source of the general predominance which includes, as one of its key features, a particular way of seeing the world and human nature and relationships, as Williams described hegemony. It should go without saying that none of these data sources are politically neutral or foolproof. Like all technologies and archives, they reflect the biases and blind spots of their designers. They may also give this project an American bias, and they don’t capture much of spoken and colloquial English. However, taken together they bring out the dominant accents that belong to the words that follow.

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THE NEW LANGUAGE OF CAPITALISM?

A notable feature of contemporary capitalist discourse is its embrace of what earlier ruling classes never hesitated to repress: dissent and heterodoxy, the stuff of innovation in the old, seventeenth-century sense. And one place where the dominant values of working life are reproduced and contested is in school, which makes education a worthwhile place to consider what, if anything, is distinctive about capitalist culture today. Entrepreneurship (and relatedly, design and innovation) is more and more common as a subject and organizing principle of curricula from primary school to college. Partisans of entrepreneurship education define entrepreneurship as the capacity to not only start companies but also to think creatively and ambitiously. Developing these different capacities is the teacher’s role. Entrepreneurship education benefits students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, write Florina Rodov and Sabrina Truong in Entrepreneur magazine, because it teaches kids to think outside the box and nurtures unconventional talents and skills. What is striking here is how, in defining entrepreneurship, the authors feel no obligation to defend it. It is not that the skills of business strategy or accounting are merely useful things for interested students to learn. Rather, schools should teach entrepreneurship for the same reasons they should nourish the civic and personal values of equality and curiosity. WeWork, a real estate firm that rents out shared office space to aspiring business owners, plans to start a private elementary school, called WeGrow, to teach what it calls conscious entrepreneurship—the adjective suggesting that some nebulous sense of social purpose, rather than simple profit, is the pedagogical goal. In an interview, Rebekah Neumann, a WeGrow founder, lamented that most schools crush the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity that’s intrinsic to all young children. She thus treats entrepreneurship as not only a trait that can be associated with youthful imagination, creativity, and curiosity, but one that is actually identical with them.⁷

Neumann’s sketch of the school’s curriculum is as shallow as one would expect of a real-estate charlatan moonlighting in education reform. She refers to a grab-bag of class-bound taste markers—yoga, meditation, farmer’s markets where the children will work shifts—details that do little other than signal her private school’s target demographic. Schools like WeWork are ultimately invested in reproducing a kind of ideal personality suited to the alternately dystopian and Pollyanna-ish mindset of today’s US elite: an autonomous individual entrepreneur built from kindergarten, whose potential can only be realized in the struggle for wealth accumulation, and whose creativity can only be productively exercised for profit. The keyword entrepreneurship here is an example of the bleak moral tenor of today’s capitalist common sense: its ideologues are preoccupied with intrinsic values, but these values are basically mercantile. At the same time, though, it is easy to overstate the novelty of this state of affairs: while WeWork’s instrumental