The New Prophets of Capital

by Nicole Aschoff

  The renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was very interested in the nature of capital. He saw the social world as a web of social relations whose dimensions were the result of “accumulated history,” so that the social relations that constitute society do not appear and disappear spontaneously, nor are they random or equal. Instead, the social relations of society are shaped by power, and in particular, by the accumulation of capital. Bourdieu argued that capital accumulation

  is what makes the games of society—not least, the economic game—something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winnings of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one … and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.40

  Bourdieu rejected this roulette image of social relations. He argued that the unequal ability of people from different socio-economic backgrounds to accumulate capital—economic, social, cultural—shapes their life chances profoundly and ensures that some will succeed while others will not. Though our society professes to be a competitive meritocracy—a “universe … of perfect opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity, or acquired properties”—Bourdieu argued that, in nearly every instance, one’s access to economic, cultural, and social capital determines success, not gumption and grit.

  Social and cultural capital are forms of capital just like economic capital. They can be achieved as an end in themselves (for fun or edification or both), but their historical purpose has always been to protect wealth, help in the competition for wealth, and identify insiders (the rich) and outsiders (the riffraff). The American Dream is premised on the assumption that if you work hard economic opportunity will present itself and financial stability will follow, but the role of cultural and social capital in paving the road to wealth and fulfillment, or blocking it, may be just as important as economic capital. Some people are able to translate their skills, knowledge, and connections into economic opportunity and financial stability, and some are not—either because their skills, knowledge, and connections don’t seem to work as well, or they can’t acquire them in the first place because they’re too poor.

  Today, the centrality of social and cultural capital is obscured (sometimes deliberately), as demonstrated in the implicit and explicit message of Oprah and her ideological colleagues. In their stories, and many others like them, cultural and social capital are easy to acquire. They tell us to get an education. Too poor? Take an online course. Go to Khan Academy. They tell us to meet people, build up our network. Don’t have any connected family members? Join LinkedIn. It’s simple. Anyone can become anything. There’s no distinction between the quality and productivity of different people’s social and cultural capital. We’re all building our skills. We’re all networking. All types of social and cultural capital are equally translatable into economic capital (and happiness), and social and cultural capital will retain their value no matter how many people acquire them.

  This is a fiction. If all or most forms of social and cultural capital were equally valuable and accessible—as the hegemonic narrative tells us they are—we should see the effects of this in increased upward mobility and wealth created anew by new people in each generation rather than passed down and expanded from one generation to the next. The data do not demonstrate this upward mobility. The United States, in a sample of thirteen wealthy countries, ranks highest on inequality and lowest on intergenerational earnings mobility.41 Wealth isn’t earned fresh in each new generation by plucky go-getters. It is passed down, preserved, and expanded through generous tax laws and the assiduous transmission of social and cultural capital.

  Rich people’s social and cultural capital is simply much more productive than the capital of the middle-class and working class. “Between 1979 and 2007 the top 1 percent of earners saw their after tax incomes rise 275 percent. The middle 60 percent saw their after-tax incomes rise 40 percent.” Since the Great Recession the top 1 percent has grabbed 95 percent of the income gains. Rich people distinguish themselves and protect their wealth by using their power to reproduce themselves through massive investments in their children starting in utero. They use their social connections and wealth to write and pass legislation, open doors, navigate the corridors of power, and provide an elite education and robust safety net for their children. The internet, social networking, and rags-to-riches stories don’t change these facts. Going to State University and stalking potential employers on LinkedIn is not equivalent to going to Harvard and having a CEO for an uncle. As economist Thomas Picketty has shown, the rich are getting richer and will in all likelihood—given the current relationship between returns on capital and economic growth—get even richer.42 The middle class is slipping and trying desperately to stick its foot in the closing door to wealth and power. But as more and more people compete to acquire the same social and cultural capital, the more each person needs ever greater amounts of social and cultural capital, and the less that social and cultural capital is worth.

  The mind-cure stories that people like Oprah tell us say this isn’t the case. Social and cultural capital are there for the taking if we want them and try for them. The real barriers are inside us, so we should focus on the inside stuff, be grateful for adversity, give back, and, most important, learn to think differently about the world so we can seize the opportunities waiting for us. But in a system stacked against everyone but the wealthiest, the inside stuff is often all we are left with.

  Jennifer Silva, a sociologist at Harvard, studies working-class youth and their coming-of-age experiences. Working-class youth today are cut off from the markers of adulthood expected by their parent’s generation. Most of them will never enjoy the traditional rites of passage (house, steady job, family) essential to the American Dream. Silva finds that, nonetheless, they have internalized the therapeutic, self-actualization, inside-stuff narrative, just like their middle-class counterparts. The narrative helps them deal with their shattered dreams and “ascribe meaning and order to the flux and uncertainty of their lives.” However, “this alternative, therapeutic coming of age story ends not with marriage, home ownership, and a career, but with self-realization gleaned from denouncing a painful past and reconstructing an independent complete self.”43

  It is from this vantage point that we can also understand the anger at gatherings like Occupy Wall Street. Occupy comprised primarily young, middle-class twenty-somethings who have done nothing but passionately pursue social and cultural capital in the hopes of landing their dream job, but who have little to show for it except a mountain of student loan debt and a job at Banana Republic.44 Opportunities for economic advancement aren’t unlimited and open to all. They are strictly regulated and open to a (relative) few, mainly the wealthy, and as wealth becomes more concentrated economic opportunities contract.

  The way we are told to get through it all and realize our dreams is always to adapt ourselves to the changing world, not to change the world we live in. We demand little or nothing from the system, from the collective apparatus of powerful people and institutions. We only make demands of ourselves. We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects.

  And yet we’re not. The popularity of mind-cure, inside-stuff strategies for alleviating alienation and achieving autonomy and success rests on our deep, collective desire for meaning and creativity in the face of overwhelming structural odds against achieving self-actualization. Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson would say that the Oprah stories, and others lik
e them, are able to “manage our desires” only because they appeal to deep fantasies about how we want to live our lives. This, after all, is what the American Dream narrative is about—not necessarily a description of life lived, but a vision of how life should be lived. When the stories that manage our desires break their promises over and over, the stories themselves become fuel for change and open a space for new, radical stories. These new stories must feature collective demands that provide a critical perspective on the real limits to success in our society and foster a vision of life that does fulfill the desire for self-actualization.45

  ________

  1Oprah Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech, May 30, 2013.

  2Janet Lowe, Oprah Winfrey Speaks: Insight from the World’s Most Influential Voice, New York: Wiley, 1998; Oprah Winfrey interview with Moira Forbes, “A Conversation with Oprah winfrey,” www.youtube.com, September 18, 2012.

  3“Remarks by the President at the Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony,” Whitehose.gov, November 20, 2003.

  4Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008, p. 110.

  5Rapoport and Wheary, Where the Poor and the Middle Class Meet.

  6Oprah Winfrey, Spelman College commencement speech, April 19, 2012.

  7Heather Laine Talley and Monica J. Casper, “Oprah Goes to Africa: Philanthropic Consumption and Political (Dis)Engagement,” in Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, eds., Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2009.

  8Clifton Fadiman, “Party of One,” Holiday, February 6, 1957, quoted in Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale, New York: Basic Books, 1969; Mark Twain, The Story of the Good Little Boy, 1875.

  9Weiss, American Myth.

  10Winfrey, Spelman commencement speech.

  11Peck, Age of Oprah; Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture, Columbia University Press, 2003; O, The Oprah Magazine, “What I Know For Sure,” May/June 2000.

  12Peck, Age of Oprah, pp. 130, 220; The Best of Oprah’s What I Know for Sure, Supplement to O, The Oprah Magazine, Nov 2000.

  13The Best of Oprah’s What I Know for Sure, Supplement to O, The Oprah Magazine, February 2001; Lowe, Oprah Winfrey Speaks, p. 167; Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech.

  14Peck, Age of Oprah, pp. 25, 32.

  15Peck, Age of Oprah, p. 217; O, The Oprah Magazine Facebook page, www.facebook.com/oprahmagazine/info.

  16O, The Oprah Magazine, January 2014.

  17O, The Oprah Magazine, February 2014.

  18O, The Oprah Magazine, December 2013.

  19Ibid.

  20O, The Oprah Magazine, January 2014.

  21O, The Oprah Magazine, December 2013.

  22O, The Oprah Magazine, January 2014.

  23Tally and Casper, “Oprah Goes to Africa.”

  24Oprah Winfrey, Stanford University commencement speech, June 15, 2008.

  25Douglas Hartmann and Teresa Toguchi Swartz, “The New Adulthood? The Transition to Adulthood from the Perspective of Transitioning Young Adults.” in Constructing Adulthood: Agency and Subjectivity in the Life Course. Advances in Life Course Research, Vol. 10, edited by R. Macmillan, Oxford, 2007, quoted in Jennifer M. Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,” American Sociological Review 77: 4, 2012, 508; see also Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, New York: Polity Press, 1991.

  26Gary Vaynerchuk, TED Talk, Web. 2.0 Expo, September 2008.

  27Dan Schwabel, “Marie Forleo: How She Grew Her Brand to Oprah Status,” Forbes, May 16, 2013.

  28See www.marieforleo.com/.

  29Oprah Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech.

  30O, The Oprah Magazine, March 2014.

  31Madeleine Schwartz, “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships,” Dissent, Winter 2013.

  32Mark Babbitt, “25 Jobs in a 50-Year Career: Is Gen Y Ready?” Savvy Intern, October 9, 2013.

  33See www.freelancersunion.org.

  34Ibid.; Freelancers Union, Instagram, February 18, 2014.

  35Freelancersunion.org.

  36Jeremy Rifkin, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2014.

  37Freelancersunion.org.

  38Ibid.; see also Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s piece on the Freelancers Union in Dissent, Winter 2012.

  39C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959], p. 6.

  40Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in J. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241–58.

  41Miles Corak, “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility,” Discussion Paper No. 7520, Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, July 2013.

  42Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

  43Jennifer Silva, “Becoming a Neoliberal Subject: Working-Class Selfhood in an Age of Uncertainty,” 2011, blogs.sciences-po.fr; Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.”

  44Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, “Changing the Subject: A Bottom-up Account of Occupy Wall Street,” Murphy Institute, City University of New York, 2013.

  45Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979), 130–48. See Kathi Weeks in The Problem with Work on the power of the demand.

  4

  The Gates Foundation and the

  Rise of Philanthrocapitalism

  “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead may or may not have said this, but it is Melinda Gates’s favorite quote, and it aptly sums up the philosophy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses are changing the world. Since its founding in 1997, the Gates Foundation has transformed the medical and research fields for diseases like malaria and pneumonia and is at the center of an education reform movement in the United States. The Gates’s recent efforts to publicize philanthropy, and their ability to leverage their wealth for social change, are encouraging other billionaires to commit to the Giving Pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.

  The transformation of Bill Gates’s image over the past two decades is remarkable. Gates, the ruthless, greedy monopolist, caricatured by Tim Robbins in the 2001 film Antitrust, has been supplanted by the earnest, humble Bill, a “worldwide force for good.”1 Melinda Gates, the other half of the foundation, is a shyer Samaritan, but is equally influential in shaping the foundation’s trajectory. Forbes ranks her at number three on its 2014 list of the World’s Most Powerful Women, right behind Angela Merkel and Janet Yellen.

  The Gates Foundation is at the forefront of a new form of philanthropy called “philanthrocapitalism.” Unlike the traditional foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), philanthrocapitalists don’t believe in old-fashioned charity. They have greater ambitions. Philanthrocapitalists want to harness the forces of capitalism that made them fabulously wealthy to help out the rest of the planet. As Bill Gates said in his Harvard commencement speech in 2007, “If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.”2 Philanthrocapitalists think profitable solutions to social problems are superior to unprofitable ones because they give private capital an incentive to care.

  These new philanthropists are no less popular for their devotion to profit. In an era of declining state legitimacy and yawning social divides, people and countries are looking for solutions, and the philanthrocapitalists seem to have them. Matthew Bishop, New York bureau chief for the Economist, and Michael Green, a writer and economist, call philanthropists like the Gates “hyperagents”�
��actors “who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else” because they don’t have to deal with voters, shareholder demands, or fundraising. They are free to think outside the box and take risks.3

  The source of these hyperagents’ superpowers is the mountains of money they have made over the past three decades. Dramatic political, economic, and social changes since the late 1970s resulting in the rise of finance, sharp declines in taxes on wealth, the tech boom, and globalization have created windfall gains for people like the Gateses, the Waltons, the Broads, and the Buffets, to name only a few. But, as some of these billionaires have acknowledged, the world has not benefited equally. Absolute poverty and childhood mortality are declining in many countries, but starvation and chronic hunger afflict more than a billion people. Every year millions of children die from preventable diseases and a third of the planet lacks clean water and access to a toilet. When Bill Gates came up for air in the late 1990s after creating the Microsoft empire he looked around and was “shocked” and “revolted” by the fate of poor people around the world. “We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not.”4 Instead, he saw a system in which capitalist markets create health and prosperity for some but death and disease for others.

  Rather than throwing up their hands in despair, the Gateses decided to channel their business acumen, penchant for innovation, and money into “refining the system.”5 As successful businesspeople, the Gateses have a deep appreciation of the power of markets and view the problems of poor people as primarily a result of market inefficiencies. They note that while capitalist markets are great at creating wealth and spurring innovation, they don’t naturally create equality. At the same time, governments and the private sector don’t naturally put their resources into the right places to fix problems caused by market inefficiencies.