Hijacking the Language

“Keywords – the New Language of Capitalism” by John P Leary, 2019

Language actually means something, as any politician, journalist and human being knows.  Words many times ‘become reality.’  Leary examines the changing words and phrases associated with what Ernest Mandel called ‘late capitalism’ and others less clearly call neo-liberalism.  What you notice about them is their euphemistic, upscale and ‘artistic’ ambience, which is meant to obscure their market and commodity-based intentions.  They reflect the usage of the upper-class, many times derived from management gurus, conformist academics, corporate journalists or capitalist economists.  They are mostly about white-collar work or environments, but have seeped into blue-collar work too.

Words Leading to Money

Leary has an alphabetized selection with an short essay on each imbued with his anti-capitalist understanding.  I’m going to be brief, and just give a hint as to what he thinks the words really mean now.  You'll have to read the book for more depth:

     1.     “Empowerment” – the opposite of actual power.

     2.     “Choice” – choosing between two or more corporate selections.

     3.     “Stakeholder” – actually just the owners or shareholders.

     4.     “Accountable” – blame the worker.

     5.     “Leadership” – corporate managers and CEOs.

     6.     “Artisanal” – expensive branding.

     7.     “Best practices” – better exploitation.

     8.     “Brand” – the commodification of everything, yourself included.

     9.     “Coach” – individualist training leading to more $.

     10.    “Sharing” – giving profits to the rich.

     11.     “Collaboration” – obeying management at all times.

     12.     “Curate” – choosing upscale items to buy.

     13.      “Flexibility” – doing what management says, part of late capitalist body analogies that 'naturalize' class domination.

     14.       “Creativity” – the merger of market and aesthetics.

     15.       “Conversation” – therapeutic fake consultation.  The short form of ‘hearing your story.’

     16.     “Content” – almost anything but mostly filler in a 24 hour cycle.

     17.     “Data” – pretend objectivity.

18.     “Design” – corporate control or plan.

19.     “Disruption” – upscale economic jargon for destructive layoffs and low pay.

20.     “Ecosystem” – the area inside a skyscraper or corporation.

21.     “Engagement” – pretending to enlist you in the 'Conversation.'
22.   "Entrepreneur" - romantic virtue profiteer.
23.   "Human Capital" - euphemism for labor, hiding human labor beneath the rubric of inhuman variable capital.  The grand-daddy of capital's rhetoric.  Capital colonizes individual human beings!

I could finish the alphabet but I won’t. I do have a beef with Leary's use of “DIY” (Do It Yourself).  Not in the sense that capital wants ‘you’ to fix all your own problems, but in the sense that few except the professional and capitalist classes have the money to hire people to always fix their cars, houses, computers, etc.  Yes, it is marketing, but fixing things yourself is unavoidable.  I.E. the proletarian going to Lowes to replace a leaky pipe is not following some capitalist meme.  However, there are not many of these over-eager misunderstandings.

Many of the terms have recycled meanings from older capitalist ideas - from Taylorism, from the work of Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Sun Tzu.  No one can still use 'the Protestant Work Ethic,' 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,' 'positive thinking', 'yankee-know-how' or the prosperity gospel without being called on it.  So these terms have been modernized and 'humanized' by management gurus like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, or economists at the University of Chicago and press like Fast Company or The Harvard Business Review.

In other words, what used to be an old-fashioned sweatshop is now a lean, flexible and sustainable entrepreneurial environment!  If you are sick of hearing this euphemistic and jargon-heavy crap day in and day out at your job, on TV or on the radio, at school, on the internet or from people you know, then you’ll enjoy this book.

Other reviews on this topic below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Doublespeak,”  “The North is not the Midwest,” “All Art is Propaganda,” “Manufacturing Consent,” “Propaganda,” “Rich People Things,” “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Post,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Empire of Illusion,” “Turning off NPR,” “Kill the Messenger,” “NPR Completes Editorial Assassination,” “All Art is Propaganda,” “J is for Junk Economics.”   

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 16, 2019