William Greider tries to “explain power in plain English” to everyday people. But he’s always ready to learn from them as well. His new book, The Soul of Capitalism, calls attention to citizens whose businesses and working lives hint at how Americans might remake our society. While First of the Month will always be responsive to voices that holler NO to power, Greider’s earned positivity makes him our kind of yes man. The Soul of Capitalism manages to be deeply — even willfully — optimistic without buying into the bottom-line of happy globalists. We hope the following interview with the author gives you reasons to look forward to the Reconstruction of America.
FOTM: In The Soul of Capitalism you argue that Americans must re-invent the economic engine that’s made America the richest country on earth. Tell us why you predict a change in Wall Street’s core values is “likely to occur.”
GREIDER: In an ironic way, Wall Street’s crimes and excesses are more visible than the innards of corporations. People can read the numbers and see the reckless waste and other contradictions. The New York Times had a business-section piece the other day on global warming and took note of the fact that better social performance produces a better bottom line, with major corporate logos as evidence. These facts are not secret and there are numerous interests outside the big boardrooms that can act on them in their investing behavior. The disconnect between conventional business lore and practical reality will sooner or later force people to move, even if the big banks and brokerages wish to remain in denial.
FOTM: You allow that Americans are currently at the mercy of imperious financiers who love liquidity not community, yet you propose that a kind of counter-culture is busy being born thanks to more conscientious venture capitalists, forward-thinking union officials, bootstrappers, enviro-developers, et. al. How is this trajectory related — or opposed — to the ongoing incorporation of the 60’s “cultural revolution” (what Tom Frank has dubbed “the conquest of cool”)?
GREIDER: That’s a very interesting question, but I think its approach to cultural change is too shallow. This is not simply about a softer focus or people changing their values. It is about people discovering their self-interest has been misdefined for them by the current system. I’m not sure whether that’s cool or hot, but I know people act on it once they grasp that they are actually losing something of value in their lives.
FOTM: You point out that American workers have the potential to transform the nature of American capitalism through their pension funds (now worth $6 trillion dollars; “$10 trillion before the stock market meltdown”). To quote AFL-CIO’s Ronald Blackwell: “The capital that belongs to working people should serve their purposes and values; right now it doesn’t. If this can be accomplished, I envision a labor movement that will step forward as an able critic of business as usual. Labor, which has frequently been seen as a narrow special interest, would become an advocate for real development and the whole community — and labor will have real money in its pocket to back up its advocacy?” Can you give us examples of union officials who are currently using pension funds to back up their advocacy for workers and communities? And would you allow that unions have been slow to exercise their power on this front?
GREIDER: The unions that have rediscovered ownership and its potential for the future mostly got there from necessity — trying to defend viable production that the home office was prepared to jettison. Some of those early leaders like Lynn Williams of the steel workers always had a larger vision — an economy in which worker ownership is the general pattern — but it’s damned hard to be visionary when your back is against the wall. Most of organized labor still does not see all the possibilities and many are still skeptical of changes that would complicate the bargaining position for unions. But I do think labor generally is ahead of the curve in understanding the potential power of their wealth holdings to force changes that go beyond narrow definitions of “economic gains.” They are in the early stages of figuring out how to apply this power.
FOTM: Over 10 million Americans are worker-owners in some 11,000 employee-owned companies. In The Soul of Capitalism , you tell the story of an exemplary temp agency called Solidarity that’s owned by the temp workers — many of whom are ex-cons and/or recovering addicts. How did you find out about their business?
GREIDER: The origins of Solidarity are far more complicated than I described in the book. It began with BUILD, the strong and enduring Baltimore community organization developed by the Industrial Areas Foundation, a network that originated with Saul Alinsky. The first objective was to develop a union for marginalized workers of many kinds — from crossing guards to Head Start aides — and ways to improve incomes for the working poor. That led, among other things, to the living wage legislation that was pioneered in Baltimore and has since spread around the country. The temp agency was launched as an extension of those efforts and I learned about it from friends who were active in the development. These same inner-city pioneers are now on the brink of acquiring a small bank, which will provide the kind of financial oxygen that all struggling small businesses need to survive and flourish.
FOTM: You celebrate “humanist-populist-capitalists” who are practical visionaries and introduce readers to John Logue — Director of the Ohio Ownership Center…
GREIDER: John Logue is not a capitalist himself — he’s a political science professor at Kent State who had the nerve and stamina to develop the Center as necessary infrastructure to assist companies and unions make the transition to employee ownership. (That is to provide experienced lawyers, accountants and bankers with the expertise to do the necessary business deals.) The “humanist-populist-capitalists” are the owners who on their own figured out why this transition could be good for wealth creation and quality as well as for the workers who become owners. They are not sentimentalists, but practical-minded types who, if pressed, will acknowledge that this also seems “the right thing to do.”
FOTM:You recently heard Logue lead a workshop on what workers might want if they could create “an employee-owned industrial park.” Tell us about that and why you found it inspiring?
GREIDER: The discussion among worker owners and their allies about a “Mondragon in Ohio” — an industrial park composed of small, employee-owned companies sharing assets and overhead functions — illustrates for me the open-ended nature of human possibilities, once people imagine beyond existing structures of control. It also explodes the usual stereotypes about what workers want. They want whole lives, they want more control over their destinies, they want practical, intelligent, self-interested collaboration with others. The present system not only discourages such creative thinking, it makes it impossible for most workers even to entertain new ideas. Given the advanced level of our development, this seems to me a criminal waste of human capabilities.
FOTM: You devote a chapter — “Consuming the Future” — to America’s environmental crisis. While you allow that employee ownership doesn’t necessarily guarantee a firm will challenge the narrow hegemonic logic of consumerism/materialism, you tell of a worker-owned firm — Blue Ridge Paper Products — that’s been relatively responsive to environmentalists. What’s the lesson implicit in their experiences on this front?
GREIDER: What’s happened at the North Carolina mills and processing plant illustrates why power is the crucial variable — ideally power located close to the operating realities of a company.This doesn’t turn the workers or their union or their management into idealized visionaries. Quite the opposite, they now have the power to alter things within the flow of production — practical changes that will yield real-life benefit where they live.This is what I mean by well-informed self-interest. As the union veep said, “we live here too.” From the other side of this great divide, environmentalists are now talking up-close with the people who have control and who vet all their recommendations in the practical setting of running a mill profitably. This does not lead to utopia, I repeat. But it brings the pressure points closer together and makes the trade-offs more visible to both sides. Human experience suggests this is a better basis for reconciliation than hammer-and-tongs confrontation or orders from on high by a few remote insiders.
FOTM: You’re fully aware of the new limits to growth, but even here you resist pessimism. Tell us where and how natural capitalism is winning and what kind of institutions will enable Green values to trump bottom-line imperatives?
GREIDER: You can look at the chemical industry or the furniture industry — both notorious polluters — and see lots of surprising gains in companies, large and small, that have embraced the commitment to sustainability. This too is self-interested, if only to avoid a black eye with consumers. But it also promises more efficiency in the long-term and prudent avoidance of obvious financial risks. The corporate lobbyists prevail today in blocking stronger regulation but it doesn’t take a management genius to figure out that sooner or later they are going to lose. Then rogue companies will face very steep costs and deteriorating stock prices. Europe is way ahead on these matters, having imposed recovery and recycling regulations that require development and design capital in the short run but deliver great savings in the long run.
That’s before you calculate the social costs that have been eliminated. While these variables have been factored in by ecologists (and some corporate managers) the connection between private and public interests lacks political standing. (It would help if a few brave candidates began to articulate a deeper conception of economic values). As progress on this front becomes more visible, it should encourage a more complex process of revaluation — what are the true costs in the production process and products? Economists tend to be oblivious here because their discipline teaches them to be concerned only with the costs to the immediate producers or the costs of change. That reactionary perspective will sooner or later lose political clout as citizens learn to see the subject whole.
FOTM: You recognize the power of corporations must be restrained ASAP and you focus on the resistance offered by citizens’ groups (like the Program on Corporation Law and Democracy). What’s the basic question that should inform struggles here?
GREIDER: The democratic question — who has power to decide, who is excluded from any meaningful voice? I am convinced that virtually all institutions within capitalism will perform better for society and for genuine economic gain if they undergo democratizing reforms. Some are simply too large and too concentrated in their power to be reformed in this manner. They will be replaced gradually by many, many smaller firms and those smaller firms will have to learn how to overcome the disadvantages of their size and scale through cooperative networks — shared functions, markets, expertise. This is doable but difficult. As I suggested in the book, it is actually a good fit with the new technologies and some well-established companies are already heading in this direction.
Other reformers would say that I’m TOO patient — that it’s possible to achieve much greater changes much faster by confronting such issues as the corporate charter and changing it to require concrete social obligations alongside the profit motive in the behavior of companies. I am not opposed to that goal. I do doubt that it is politically attainable any time soon — especially before there are more obvious outlines of an alternative social reality, existing examples of successful reform that people and politicians can observe.
FOTM: While you acknowledge the “plain fact” that “reinventing capitalism is impossible without reformation of government,” your own vision is marked by your clarity about the (relative) pointlessness of national party politics at this juncture. Would it be right to assume that you’ve pretty much bought out of disputes on the left between, say, liberal Democrats and Greens?
GREIDER: I deliberately avoided the ideological disputes in my book, partly because these tend to turn the discussion to large abstractions rather than toward concrete examples from reality. My strong feeling is that we are about to enter a new era of reform (something like the early 20th century) but it’s a bit premature to try to define its outlines and contending forces.
Someone once said: let a thousand flowers bloom. We will learn soon enough which ones flourish and which ones wilt of their own contradictions. I am for radical change. I am for incremental change. I have an idealized notion of how things might turn out. I also have patience and tolerance for imperfect experiments that may be half-steps toward something larger. If you believe, as I do, that we really are at a new moment in history, you have to acknowledge that we simply do not know enough yet to describe what the future will look like with ideological certainty. This means we’re on a longer, open road, but it holds true to what we say we believe about democracy.
FOTM: While you suggest that national party politics is a non-starter given that corporations rule Washington, you note that local and state politics are more promising venues for political reformers. I wonder if you paid much attention to what recently happened in Alabama where the conservative, born-again Republican governor tried to take on entrenched class power? Do you consider that battle to be an anomaly or is it a sign of what could happen (for better or worse) in the future?
GREIDER: I tried to write this book in a way that would speak to ordinary Americans. That approach assumes that underneath class and partisan labels, even regional and religious differences, there is a commonality. I believe some aspect of my subject should be available to most everyone, whatever their circumstances. That is wishful, I know, but that was my goal. It required me not to demonize some citizens as backward and others as enlightened. I have found some confirmation for this approach in people’s reactions to the book.
Thinking in those terms, the dilemma of born-again Christian Republicans, especially in the conservative south, is particularly acute. I hope my book pokes at their sensibilities too. The recent battle over tax reform in Alabama demonstrates how difficult it is to overcome class-determined cultural reflexes and self-injuries. People of modest means rushed to vote against their own interests, as well as those of their state and society in general. A pessimist would say these dividing lines are immutable. My life’s experience — witnessing how the civil rights movement changed this country, changed all of our lives — tells me that cannot be so.
FOTM: Many of your exemplary capitalists are Republicans — David Stockman, Robert Monks. Do their counter-cultural business practices hint at the possibility of a significant realignment of our party politics down the line?
GREIDER: Yes, but don’t ask me how. We have already seen currents shift over the last two decades as some who grew up affluent and Republican (myself included) found the liberal Democratic party more comfortable, while lots of working class Democrats moved in the opposite direction, feeling abandoned or disrespected by the party of their upbringing. I can’t read the future currents with any confidence because, frankly, neither party is yet prepared to embrace what I describe. Who owns the idea of worker ownership, for instance? There are a scattered few in both parties who advocate it now, but is this a conservative idea or a liberal idea? It’s not easy to answer that question.
FOTM: It’s been suggested (most recently by the journalist Christopher Caldwell) that liberty is the foundational principle of those on the right while equality is the key for people on the left. Would you elaborate on the idea that the examples of soulful capitalism you cite implicitly refuse this antimony?
GREIDER: I reject the long-argued view that those are polar opposites. I embrace both and so do most Americans. If we tinker with the words a bit, it seems clear that liberty and equality go hand in hand, especially in our modern circumstances. First, if liberty in fact means the freedom of self-realization, then most Americans cannot possibly become genuinely free without engaging in collective action. Second, in a society of great abundance where scarcity is no longer the main challenge, then equality must be based on something beyond material accumulation. It should be founded on the ability — the right — to live one’s life as fully as one’s spirit and energy allow. This is an old socialist conception, of course, but I do not envision everyone winding up with the same bank account. Or the same set of aspirations and talents (or the same level of money-seeking intensity). What I can imagine is a society in which every child feels a sense of entitlement (as Robert Coles called it). To go anywhere in this country and feel comfortable, if not at home. To pursue life’s possibilities from a platform of material comforts and with the skills to participate fully in work that is self-fulfilling (also productive). To reach beyond one’s inherited circumstances — or to remain comfortably within them. We need — someday — a new bill of rights. I am not sure I will be around for that happy moment, but it could be an empowering national goal — literally liberating for most citizens.
FOTM: The Soul of Capitalism‘s sense of possibility may seem out of time at a moment when many commentators see America on the verge of a kinder, gentler fascism. Do the doomy analyses of the academic left confirm their distance from the experience of everyday people — and experience in general? (I’m reminded on this score of a well-known man of the left who ended what was meant to be a stirring address at a “Socialist Scholars Conference” with the following call: “Back to the libraries!”)
GREIDER: There is of course a lot of brilliant analysis and I read it. I do think, however, that much of the left-liberal progressive side (but not all) is looking backward, not forward.Their most creative decades are way in the past and it’s naturally hard for them to let go. One implicit purpose of my new book — never stated plainly — is to help younger thinkers break free of that past and see the present more clearly, more creatively. There is plenty of misery in our present circumstances, but it is not like the 1930s or 1890s and it is not going to be like those times. This sounds arrogant, which is why I did not state it plainly in the book.
FOTM: Your invocation of the need for “radical patience” reminds me of the lessons implicit in Lawrence Goodwyn’s great books on the American populist movement and Poland’s Solidarnosc. I know you appreciate those works. Tell us why they matter to you…
GREIDER: Goodwyn’s books gave me the language of democracy — and the nerve — to write the kind of books I have written. He has also been my great teacher in person — rigorous and yet unbelievably generous. Whenever we talk, I feel refreshed and ready to plunge on. The core of what I learned from him is that the deeper politics of this country lies in the experiences and stored knowledge of ordinary people. It flows along mostly unnoted, like an underground river, and once in a great while it surfaces with force and changes the society.
When he explained this to me years ago, I realized this is what I had been hearing as a reporter for many years in my encounters with ordinary folks who lack power and influence, who have no credentials or even much book learning, but who know certain things — important verities that ought to be part of our democratic politics, actually some day ought to steer it.
This view offends many learned citizens, of course, regardless of their political persuasions. But I can listen to Goodwyn or listen to those ordinary citizens and realize that they are speaking for the core of our history. They should be able to speak for our common future. So I am on their side. I write my books in the hope that explaining power in plain English may help them find their voice.
FOTM: In your acknowledgements, you mention that you’re indebted to your editor Alice Mayhew who told you (gently) to start over after reading an early draft of the book? How did she help you?
GREIDER: In a subtle sense, she gave me the authority to write the book I have written (for better or worse). She read early chapters and saw that the pace I had set was going to make a very long book in which I told too many stories and slipped in the big points along the way. In effect, she said: don’t hide behind a lot of stories — wonderful as they may be. Come out front and say what it is you wish to say. As a reporter, I had learned to do the former. So I tried to do the latter. There is more me, upfront, in this book than in my previous ones. It is also (I hope) easier to read, easier to see my message whole.
FOTM: You argue that citizens need to think like capitalists – “to develop their own forward-looking narratives for the society and figure out how to make them come true” — but isn’t there a danger in a relentless focus on the future. Doesn’t that give a historical pass to George W. Bush’s class? I’m reminded of the President’s suggestion that the recent corporate scandals might have had the silver lining of making Americans a more ethical people: “I believe people have taken a step back and asked, ‘What’s important in life? You know, the bottom line and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself?'” As one commentator noted: “No decent human being could disagree. But no half-intelligent human being could fail to note that such things are a lot easier to say when you’ve already banked your own 30 or 50 mil.” Does it make sense to foster a hand-as-dealt acceptance (at least for now) of current class-based disparities in wealth?
GREIDER: I suppose my emphasis on “thinking forward” could be misunderstood. But I am trying to coax people — especially young people — out of their sense of resignation and timidity.I’ve had beer-drinking sessions with young people in which I announce one rule — let’s not talk about current politics and issues. Let’s talk about what you want this country to become, say, 25 years from now.Once they get over a natural hesitation (nobody wants to sound like a fool), the conversation becomes rich, illuminating and contentious. Once you have articulated a vision of the future, then you can work your way back to the present and talk about how the country might get there. At a minimum, it’s a lot more fun than droning on about how hopeless things are.
FOTM: In your chapter on “Public Works” you look back to grand moments of government-sponsored economic development (like Lincoln’s Homestead Act– “some 80 million acres of government land became the private property of families.”) Does the administration’s current readiness to fund the reconstruction of Iraq offer an opening to politicians inclined to make the case for public works in America?
GREIDER: Yes indeed. We are getting some good questions raised by candidates in this presidential cycle about the purposes of government and the follies of empire. I expect those questions to intensify in the next few years as Americans at large begin to grasp that we are not the triumphant economy they have been told. When our foreign creditors start to exercise power over our destiny as a nation, this is going to be very upsetting for folks. It could turn reactionary, of course. Or it could open a rich discussion, not only of our role in the world, but about re-developing our nation’s interior landscape. I think most Americans would choose make the latter a priority.
From January, 2004