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Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back – review
In Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, Elizabeth Anderson argues that neoliberalism has perverted the Protestant work ethic to exploit workers and enrich the one per cent. Magdalene D’Silva finds the book a compelling call to renew a progressive, socially democratic work ethic that promotes dignity for workers.
Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned The Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. Elizabeth Anderson. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
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Elizabeth Anderson’s excellent 2023 book Hijacked was published the same month Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner said:
“Unemployment has to jump … we need to see pain … Employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them … We’ve gotta kill that attitude…”
America’s Senator Bernie Sanders rebuked Gurner’s diatribe as “disgusting. It’s hard to believe that you have that kind of mentality among the ruling class in the year 2023.”
Ironically, Gurner’s comments favouring employees’ objectification and employer coercive control show just what Hijacked says is: [T]he ascendance of the conservative work ethic… (which) tells workers … they owe their employers relentless toil and unquestioning obedience under whatever harsh conditions their employer chooses …”(xii).
Indeed, “neoliberalism is the descendant of this harsh version of the work ethic … [i]t entrenches the commodification of labor … people have no alternative but to submit to the arbitrary government of employers to survive.” (xii).
Anderson defines neoliberalism as an ideology favouring market orderings over state regulation […] to maximise the wealth and power of capital relative to labour
Anderson defines neoliberalism as an ideology favouring market orderings over state regulation (xii) to maximise the wealth and power of capital relative to labour (272) where the so-called “de-regulation” of labour and other markets doesn’t liberate ordinary people from the state; it transfers state regulatory authority to the most powerful, dominant firms in each market (xii).
Hijacked follows Anderson’s prior writing on neoliberalism’s replacement of democratically elected public government by the state, with unelected private government by employers. Like other work ethic critiques, Hijacked explains how Puritan theologians behind the work ethic dismissed feelings with contempt for emotional styles of faith worship (3).
Hijacked explains how Puritan theologians behind the work ethic dismissed feelings with contempt for emotional styles of faith worship
The original work ethic proselytised utilitarianism (19) but with inherent contradictions between progressive and conservative ideals (14). Early conservative work ethic advocates included Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus and Edmund Burke (Chapters 2 and 3) who aligned with the new capitalist, manager entrepreneur classes and “lazy landlords, speculators and predatory capitalists” (65) who claimed they exemplified the work ethic (127).
The work ethic split into conservative and progressive versions which Anderson distinguishes by class-based power relations, rather than competitive markets
The work ethic split into conservative and progressive versions which Anderson distinguishes by class-based power relations, rather than competitive markets, as conservatives “favour government by and for property owners, assign different duties to employers and employees, rich and poor” (while expecting) “workers to submit to despotic employer authority” (and) “regard poverty as a sign of bad character … poor workers as morally inferior” (xv).
Progressives like Adam Smith (130-135) supported “democracy and worker self-government. They oppose class-based duties … and reject stigmatization of poverty” (xvi). Anderson traces this “progressive” work ethic to classical liberals like John Locke (Chapter 2), Adam Smith (132-135), John Stuart Mill (Chapter 6) and progressive, socialist thinkers like Karl Marx (Chapter 7) who stressed how paid work should not alienate workers “from their essence or species-being…” (209) but express their individuality, as “[t]he distinctively human essence is to freely shape oneself…” (209).
Marx applied Mill’s emphasis on the importance of individuality, which Anderson links to the Puritan idea that our vocation must match our individual talents and interests (206) whatever our economic class.
Furthermore, Locke “condemned the idle predatory rich as well as able-bodied beggars” (65). Marx applied Mill’s emphasis on the importance of individuality, which Anderson links to the Puritan idea that our vocation must match our individual talents and interests (206) whatever our economic class.
Yet our worthiness now had to be proved (to God) by ‘work’ that entailed: disciplining drudgery (9), slavery (10, 259), racism (97-99), exploitative maltreatment of poor people (106) and industrious productivity (52) which became conspicuously competitive, luxury consumption (170).
Conservatives (Chapters 3, 4) secularised these ideas so the “upper-class targets of the Puritan critique hijacked the work ethic … into an instrument of class warfare against workers. Now only workers were held to its demands … the busy schemers who … extract value from others cast themselves as heroes of the work ethic, the poor as the only scoundrels” (65).
Anderson doesn’t idolise Locke, Smith, J. S. Mill and other early progressive work ethic advocates like Ricardo (Chapter 5) by highlighting harsh contradictions in their views. For example, within Locke’s pro-worker agenda were draconian measures for poor children (61) such that Anderson says Locke’s harsh policies for those he called the idle poor, contain “the seeds of the ultimate hijacking of the work ethic by capital owners” (25).
[Anderson’s] scrutiny of both left and right-wing support of the neoliberal conservative work ethic complements other critiques of the left-wing origins of neoliberal markets.
Anderson criticises the perversion and reversal of the work ethic’s originally progressive, classical liberal aspirations “and successor traditions on the left” (xviii). Her scrutiny of both left and right-wing support of the neoliberal conservative work ethic complements other critiques of the left-wing origins of neoliberal markets. Anderson also says the conservative work ethic arose in a period of rapidly rising productivity and stagnant wages, “when market discipline was reserved for workers, not the rich” (108).
Yet it was the progressive work ethic that culminated in social democracy throughout Western Europe by promoting the “freedom, dignity and welfare of each” (242). Marx was so influenced by the progressive work ethic espoused by classical liberals, his most developed work on economic theory apparently quotes Adam Smith copiously and admiringly (226). Anderson thus contends that criticism of social democracy as a radical break from classical liberalism – is a myth, as ideas like social insurance “developed within the classical liberal tradition” (227).
However, “Cold War ideology represented social democracy as … a slippery slope to totalitarianism … the title of Friederich Hayek’s … Road to Serfdom, says it all” (226).
Social democracy declined worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberalism arose and the conservative work ethic returned with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
Social democracy declined worldwide in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberalism arose and the conservative work ethic returned with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (Chapter 9). Social democratic centre-left parties like the US Democrats and the UK’s Labour Party (293) didn’t counter neoliberalism’s conservative work ethic, as “the demographics of these parties shifted… from the working class to the professional managerial class” (257), seduced by meritocracy ideology in a competitive race for (their own) superior status (257). Anderson’s observation complements Elizabeth Humphry’s research on how Australia’s Labor Party and labour union movement introduced vanguard neoliberalism to Australia against workers, in the 1980s.
[Anderson] argues the focus on efficiency and aggregate growth neglected workers’ conditions and plight as neoliberal work (for welfare) policies degrade people’s autonomy and capabilities
Anderson recognises the success of some neoliberal policies in the US’s economic stagnation in the 1970s, like trucking deregulation, emissions reduction trade schemes and international trade liberalisation (285-287). However, she argues the focus on efficiency and aggregate growth neglected workers’ conditions and plight as neoliberal work (for welfare) policies degrade people’s autonomy and capabilities because “the most important product of our economic system is ourselves” (288).
Hijacked’s last chapter recommends social democracy renewal and updating the progressive work ethic “to ensure … every person … has the resources and opportunities to develop … their talents … engage with others on terms of trust, sympathy and genuine cooperation” (298). Employees could be empowered through worker cooperatives (297).
A gap in Hijacked’s analysis is a lack of clear definition of “work.” Anderson doesn’t distinguish between “employment” in a “job,” and rich elites’ voluntary, symbolic “duties,” like those of Britain’s “working royals” who call their activities “work”.
Another dilemma is whether economic class power struggles can change peacefully, noting Peter Turchin says we’re facing ‘end times’ of war and political disintegration because competing elites won’t relinquish power.
Nevertheless, Hijacked is compelling reading for everyone on the left and the right who needs employment in a paid job to survive, so today’s neoliberal conservative work ethic no longer gaslights us to believe our dignity demands our exploitation.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Daniel Foster on Flickr.
The Politician: Reconsidering Shintaro Ishihara Part 3
Published in Japan Forward 4/6/2022
In 1963, Ishihara wrote an article about a Sumo wrestling match that he had just watched. It was a decisive bout between two grand champions on the last day of the tournament. Ishihara’s contention was that it had been fixed. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he sneered in print.
Cue outrage from the Sumo Association and the fans of the wrestlers, one of whom was Taiho, an all-time great of the sport. A criminal complaint was lodged against Ishihara and the newspaper, who were forced to apologize, their chances of winning in court being close to zero.
The great Taiho
A half century later, he was vindicated when a police investigation uncovered large-scale match-rigging, leading to the cancellation of a tournament, the expulsion of 23 wrestlers from the sport and lurid headlines about drug use and gangland connections.
Ishihara, then in his last year as Governor of Tokyo, enjoyed the moment. “Sumo has always been like that,” he declared in a press conference. “The idea that it represents the essence of Japan’s traditional culture is laughable.”
Ishihara could be insensitive, stubborn, prejudiced and downright rude, as with his sexist comments about the current Governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike. As an unapologetic nationalist, he took strong positions on divisive topics such as the comfort women and Yasukuni Shrine.
Those who agreed with him admired his outspokenness. Those who didn’t, included many foreign observers, were shocked. The fact that the people of Tokyo, a relatively liberal city, elected him as governor four times in a row suggests that “culture war” issues have limited importance to large swathes of the electorate.
April 2000 Time Cover
As Japan’s longest-lasting provocateur, Ishihara was never afraid to give his opinion, even when the “sensible” thing was to say nothing. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he was wrong. Occasionally, he seemed to be wrong but was finally proved right.
That was the case with Sumo wrestling and may turn out to be true about a much bigger subject, relations with the People’s Republic of China.
BLUE STORM RISING
In 1973, Ishihara set up a cross-factional pressure group of 31 parliamentarians, giving it the poetical name of “Seirankai” (“Blue Storm Society”). With characteristic dramatic flair, he had the members sign a blood oath, following in the steps of Ryoma Sakamoto, a hero of the mid-nineteenth century, ladies of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters and other non-mainstream groups.
Japanese political factions are based on patronage and personal connections, not ideology, but the largest presence was from the Fukuda faction with none from the Tanaka faction.
That was necessarily the case since Tanaka had just negotiated the normalization of relations with Communist China and the consequent severing of ties with Taiwan. Ishihara and the Blue Stormers were bitterly opposed to this move.
Tanaka with Mao and Chou Enlai in 1972
Of course, Japan was simply mirroring the U.S., as most of the Western bloc did. In the context of the Cold War, it seemed that President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had pulled off a brilliant geopolitical coup by splintering the already fragile relationship between China and the Soviet Union.
The sacrifice of tiny Taiwan, peremptorily expelled from the United Nations, seemed well worth it. Anyone who disagreed was surely on the wrong side of history.
Now, many decades after the end of the Cold War, the verdict of history seems a lot less clear. China has been controlled by the Chinese Communist Party for longer than the Soviet Union existed, and reputable studies have revealed the severe economic and social damage done to the U.S. by Chinese trade policies.
Ishihara was sometimes considered “anti-Chinese” – an impression not helped by some ill-judged off-the-cuff remarks – but he was always a strong supporter of Taiwan, which he visited many times, and respected traditional Chinese culture. It was authoritarian modern China that he detested. In 2008, he likened the Beijing Olympics to the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
The media labelled Blue Storm a far right group, given its emphasis on constitutional reform and patriotic education, but it also included some pragmatists like Michio Watanabe and Taku Yamasaki.
With the benefit of hindsight, some of its positions seem much less radical. In the pacifism-dominated intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s, the proposal that the Japanese Self Defence Forces should take part in U.N. peace-keeping operations was beyond the pale. Now it seems unexceptional.
Interestingly, the Blue Storm charter pledged to reduce inequality and create “a new socialism” that penalizes non-labour income. That’s not a million miles from the “new capitalism” described, somewhat hazily, by current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Blue Storm faded when Takeo Fukuda became Prime Minister and, as commercial realism dictated, went along with Tanaka’s policy of building an economic relationship with Beijing. Ishihara remained close to the Fukuda faction – today in the hands of Japan’s most powerful politician, Shinzo Abe – but was too much of a maverick to belong to any faction himself.
WHAT WOULD JOHNNY DEPP SAY?
How successful a politician was Shintaro Ishihara? That depends how you define political success. He was certainly a huge presence for half a century and chalked up a stellar record of electoral victories.
Ishihara won election to Japan’s national parliament ten times, once for the less important Upper House and nine times for the Lower House. Additionally, he won four elections for the Governorship of Tokyo, which has a bigger economy than Holland.
His public loved him, but his fellow politicians were less impressed. He was awarded just two cabinet posts, each lasting a year – Minister of the Environment under Fukuda and Minister of Transport under Noboru Takeshita in 1988.
In 1989, Ishihara stood for leadership of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which would have automatically made him Prime Minister. Instead, he was thrashed by the bland Toshiki Kaifu, securing just 11% of the vote.
The problem was already obvious when Ishihara was Minister of the Environment in 1977. At the time, the LDP was prioritizing the pollution issue which was threatening to discredit Japan’s high growth economic model.
The worst pollution scandal concerned Minamata disease, recently the subject of a pretty good Johnny Depp movie, “Minamata”.
Depp as Eugene Smith
Rather than pouring oil on troubled water, Ishihara inflamed the situation by suggesting that some of the compensation claims were bogus.
In fact, he may have been right – one claimant was Shoko Asahara, later to found the psychopathic Aum cult – but that wasn’t the point. The government needed to make the problem go away, which was both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. Cavilling about who should get how much money was terrible politics.
Forced to make amends, Ishihara travelled to the Minamata area and performed “dogeza” – bowing in a kneeling position, forehead touching the ground – before the mother of a severely handicapped girl.
There was to be no job for him in Fukuda’s second cabinet.
Provocateurs have an important place in the political ecosystem, but not at the centre of policymaking, where compromise and quid-pro-quo deals are often necessary. Gadflies like U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul exist on the fringes, which is why people listen to them.
Ishihara seemed more comfortable as Governor of Tokyo. With one important exception, his room for causing serious trouble was circumscribed. Despite indulging in his trademark verbal outrages from time to time, he ran the city in a pragmatic way. I for one was happy to see the mass cull of jungle crows that he initiated.
These huge scavengers, their glossy feathers testifying to the gourmet diet they obtained from Tokyo’s high-protein trash, had become apex predators. They cawed derisively at people going to work, dive-bombed babies in prams and damaged diversity by outcompeting smaller birds. The city was better with much fewer of them.
Apex predator
BAITING THE DRAGON
The one piece of serious mischief that Ishihara managed during his stint as governor proved to be the most consequential of all his provocations.
Concerning the ownership of the Senkaku Islands, known in China as the Diaoyu chain, it led to a sudden and severe breakdown of relations between Japan and China and changed Japanese attitudes towards its huge neighbour permanently.
The Senkakus are very small and have been uninhabited since 1940. In the preceding forty years, a community of a few hundred Japanese had lived there, eking out a living from guano, dried bonito flakes and albatross eggs and feathers. It was only after oil was discovered under the seabed in 1970 that China pressed its claim.
More recently, China has used tiny islands in the South China Sea, even sandbars, as instruments of military power projection. Strategically placed islands have become important geopolitical counters, as strategy guru Dr. Pippa Malmgren has pointed out.
Senkaku Isles
In 2012, the now defunct Democratic Party of Japan was in power with the hapless Yoshihiko Noda serving as Prime Minister. In China, Xi Jinping had yet to take over as Maximum Leader. Already, though, there had been a number of small scale clashes around the Senkaku Isles between the Japanese coastguard and Chinese fishing boats.
The DPJ government sought to defuse the situation, and even cover the incidents up. The most powerful political figure in the DPJ, the man who had turned a party of oddballs and dreamers into an election-winning force, was the strongly pro-China Ichiro Ozawa, a former protégé of Kakuei Tanaka.
Just a few years before, Ozawa had led an enormous delegation of 600 politicians and business leaders to Beijing, in an attempt to reconfigure Japan’s foreign policy in a more pro-China direction.
Brilliantly, Ishihara identified the lever that would destroy the DPJ, finish off Ozawa’s reputation as a political puppet-master and tear off China’s mask of benign trading partner, revealing the ruthless would-be hegemon underneath.
The key point was that the Senkaku Isles were not Japanese government property, but for historical reasons belonged to a Japanese family. Ishihara offered to buy the islands in the name of the Tokyo Metropolitan government. The owners accepted.
Panicked by the possibility that Ishihara might build structures there, which would be certain to antagonize China, the Noda government stepped in with a higher bid and nationalized the islands.
If Noda thought that would solve the problem, he was horribly mistaken. The nationalization seemed to enrage the Chinese even more.
The outcome was an orchestrated orgy of anti-Japanese destruction reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Factories of companies like Panasonic – the first Japanese company to manufacture in China, answering a direct request from Deng Xiaoping – were set ablaze and Japanese-owned department stores ransacked and Japanese cars trashed.
Trashing a Japanese car
Japanese TV showed demonstrators waving signs that said “exterminate the Japanese”, and Chinese officials publicly questioned Japanese sovereignty over Okinawa.
Ishihara could not have hoped for better outcome. Japan’s pro-China business lobby was totally discredited, and public sentiment grew increasingly hostile. According to Pew Research, the proportion of Japanese who took a negative view of China rose from 61% in 2011 to 93% in 2013.
At the time, that was an unusual phenomenon. Now many other countries are catching up fast.
THE INIMITABLE ISHIHARA
Ishihara defies attempts to categorize him. At one point he was following ministry guidelines in sanctioning teachers who refused to have the national anthem sung at school ceremonies. At another, he was declaring how much he disliked the anthem’s lyrics, with their overtones of selfless devotion to the country. Instead, he said, he preferred to fit words of his own invention when required to sing it, much to the surprise of whoever was standing next to him.
As a judge for the Akutagawa literary prize in the mid-1990s, he championed some controversial works, including a story about a high-school teacher having gay liaison with a pupil. Yet a few years later he was criticizing the number of gay performers on TV variety shows. Consistency was never his strength.
Adventurer, trend-maker, script-writer, serious literary novelist, polemicist, geopolitical prankster and sworn enemy of jungle crows – he was one of a kind. For better or for worse, we shall not look on his like again.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016 - 6:57pm
At the Campaign for America's Future, Dave Johnson has a comprehensive roundup of the Sanders “Economic Plan” Controversy. The controversy is practically non-existant outside of the left wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Clinton/Obama/Clinton Democrats. The plan is pretty much what you'd expect from a New Dealer, as Chomsky characterises Sanders. It's a welcome change from policies that have created the post-GFC malaise, but hardly radical or historically unprecedented.
As you'd expect, economists with intelligence and integrity like Bill Black and Jamie Galbraith did their best to introduce some reason to public discourse, while journalists on the economics beat largely ignored tham and scrambled to stake out a position that they could defend as balanced. As you'd also expect, but nonetheless disappointingly, Paul Krugman lined up with those he would usually deride as Very Serious People (VSPs). I generally enjoy Krugman. He's witty and articulate, and performs a useful service against Republican politicians beloved of VSPs such as Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Ryan Rand. (Hang on; I think one of those isn't a real person. Maybe more than one.)
Sadly, Krugman is not inclined to entertain ideas outside the range of opinions between Clinton and Bush, or if you prefer, Clinton and Bush (or Bush). And those issues upon which "moderate" Republicans and Democrats agree do not for Krugman count as contestable issues; they are part of the built-in political furniture. In this sense, he's as much a VSP as anybody. If he wasn't, he wouldn't be doing his job.
The New York Times' readership is the one percent. It makes sense therefore to maintain that real economic injustice is the work of the one-tenth of one percent. "It's not you, dear reader, it's those cads who buy the TImes but don't read my column who are to blame." Magnifying marginal distinctions, dismissing the significant, and excluding the challenging comes with the territory.
As a commentator, Krugman is a Jerry Seinfeld at a time which requires a Bill Hicks. In the second term of the Sanders presidency, I will be happy to read his wry observations about airline food and the latest crazy things Senator Ivanka Trump has been saying. In the meantime…