Powell Memorandum at 50

[pbrower2a]

(09-08-2021, 09:27 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(09-07-2021, 10:42 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: I wonder if any of you see any significant correlation between the Powell Memo and the type of society which took hold a decade or so later. That's when, with the advent of the Yuppie culture, we became a decidedly workaholic culture which, I have pointed out many times, is the opposite of what many pundits expected with the advent of the technology most of us now kneel at the feet of. Are we trying to get a lot of work done before the solemnity of the 4T set in? This although the saecular drama was not exposed until the 90s. High tech version of "Make hay while the sun shines"?  Was it a case of the society feeling some sense of urgency in which work became like a God in many folks' minds?  Enthusiasm, passion, and possibly even overdoing it, were highlighted. Many apparently didn't seem to remember to come up for air even to this day as there are still so many with that mindset. That the to-do list never seems to end. And, while we're at it, does anyone think we will ever really see that society of increased leisure that was once all but promised?

Yes, we decided to put the Protestant work ethic on steroids, and punish those least willing to comply.  Rewards?  Yes, for some hard workers, but certainly not for all.  Was it fair?  Hell no, but it's a religious fervor thing and hard to kill for that reason alone.  We may have finally recognized the idiocy of the practice -- at least in most spheres of the economy.  Apparently, High Tech is still slave territory, as are the most competitive parts of the law, medicine and consultancy.  Watching less produce more may alter even those, so hope springs from odd sources.  Perhaps just this once, the lowly working class will instruct "their betters" on being both productive and happy.

The reward for hard work for the working class was bare survival. Say what you want about high technology, but the biggest sector of employment in California remains agriculture, a sector infamous for abysmal wages and limited opportunity. The dirty secret of the American economy is that agriculture remains the foundation because without it we would have sky-high food prices and would not meet the costs of importing so much of the "candy" at Best Buy and similar places. High Tech could pay well for a time in America, but American Big Business quickly farmed out the manufacturing overseas. 

The ethos of the neoliberal era is best described as cynically as I can describe my experience in the 1980's: 

"Suffer for my holy greed, you peon, and always show that big smile that shows how happy you are!"

I am reminded of old Cold War propaganda from school textbooks of the 1960's in which the Soviet economy was contrasted to ours by showing happy Americans and frowning Russians. Typical photographic images from the USSR and China were from winter, when winter coats that lacked individuality (they were similarly drab in a Michigan winter) that summer attire might have. OK, so Americans owned cars and houses if they had well-paying blue-collar jobs, as in the automobile and appliance industries. 

The objective of neoliberalism was to take as much of the rewards of work in for-profit industry from workers and transfer that to owners and executives. In part to that end, work was itself dumbed-down to require minimal skill, especially in retailing and food service activities that burgeoned. Work in such businesses, and one had better have well-off family members still in the middle class with whom to live. Those overbuilt "Little boxes, little boxes... and they're all made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same" that Malvina Reynolds reviled in the Boom Awakening turned out handy, did they not? 

Neoliberalism succeeded at ending stagflation. Get people to work without really paying those who do the bulk of the work but crack the whip in the workplace, and stagnant wages can ensure that any increases in productivity go to owners and executives. The Right pushed superstition such as young-earth creationism and such pseudohistory as the "providential" basis of American life -- that the Founding Fathers were in essence Fundamentalist Christians instead of the Deists that most were. Never mind that Fundamentalism was coined only as recently as 1926, a full 150 years after the American Declaration of Independence and was relatively new in the 1980's as a doctrine. 

The difference between early capitalists offering religion as an anodyne for exploitation (Pie in the Sky When You Die So Long as You Die) in "classical" Marxist thought and a mind-numbing mass low culture is the absence of any judgment on the hollowness of the offering. So the effect of glorious technology is that we have a highly-sophisticated "idiot screen" in front of which people who learn nothing from what they are watching except to participate in the consumer economy as designed (vegetate in front of the screen, eat horrid foodstuffs and drink sugary sodas or mass-market beer) and end up dying of heart attacks around age 50 that relate to obesity.   

Those "little boxes, little boxes" are often approaching the end of their expected "service lives", and so is the infrastructure built to support them. The American population except in rural areas with declining populations is growing faster than the housing stock, so housing costs can continue to skyrocket while the quality declines.  

So we have some big problems.