Late Capitalism and the English Language

Besides the pandemic, our recent past has seen no shortage of social ills that remain to be solved - and issues of social justice and environmental concerns remain front and center in the public mind. These concerns are not new, but what is striking is the language we use when we address them. That language inevitably revolves around one thing - money (and things related to money). When we talk about sustainability, we talk about what and where to buy, instead of buying less. When we talk about Black Lives Matter we talk about “supporting” - meaning, shopping with - black-owned businesses and defunding the police, instead of talking about using the political system to build a more just and equitable society. The rhetoric around education always centers on budgets and never on championing the intangible value education plays in shaping critically minded citizenry.

But there is danger in the language of capitalism being the only available language to us. Language is the most essential semiotic system that humans use in shaping societal values - how we speak, what words and concepts we use, deeply influences our understanding of how we should live. It’s no wonder that the central task of all agents of power, from leaders of totalitarian regimes to the heads of corporations, has been to manipulate language. George Orwell warned about this in his seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” And though this essay is still taught at schools here and there, its message, that language is a habit of the mind and that bad habits are a threat to building a better world, seems to have been largely lost on us.

Instead, what we are looking at today is a complete victory of late capitalism as the only available value system for engendering change, the role that was previously the province of religion, literature, and philosophy. Our language has been permeated by capitalist terms, meaning the transactional terms, down to the most personal issues. When we talk about dating it’s not in terms of love but in terms of being “on the market” or “off the market.” When we talk about career growth, it’s not in terms of personal achievement and talent but in terms of “building my brand.” No one bats an eyelash when career advisers talk about selling yourself, nor flinches at being designated as a “human resource.” Universities routinely refer to their students as “clients,” forgetting that they are supposed to be the one place in society where the customer is not always right.

And while everyday English is getting more transactional, the language of corporations is getting more human. We are not buying goods or services anymore but “supporting” businesses. Brands are not in the business of luring customers but with “building communities.” Every company rushes to trumpet its “values” to everyone else. But despite this corporate self-hypnosis, companies are still just selling stuff, and the only thing corporations achieve is cognitive dissonance and an increase in stress levels in their employees, who consistently need to lie to themselves to make their work more exciting than it really is. In the wake of the recent toxic working environment scandal at the direct-to-consumer luggage brand, Away, one employee was shocked to realize that the company’s mission, “it’s about travel” - as opposed to, say “it’s about selling suitcases but through an app” - was “just a smokescreen to get employees to work harder and longer.”

For corporations this “value-creation” has all of the upside and none of the downside. By broadcasting their “values” corporations appear virtuous without taking much risk, just like all those brands that told you to vote in the last election, but would never tell you who to vote for. No, the brunt of the cost is born by the corporate employees, who are disoriented as to the transactional status of their work. In the past, the worker/capitalist relationship was simple - an employee exchanged labor in return for wages. And this class-consciousness allowed for labor unionization and bargaining power to improve the workers' lot. The sorry state of labor unions today and the capitalist language that permeates our daily life is not unconnected.

But not all blame must be put at the feet of late capitalism. We are partly to blame, because we have allowed capitalist language to permeate our lives. Contrary to the popular view that evil corporations are zapping people’s brains, what is happening is that they are simply responding to a generation of consumers who grew up in a culture defined by consumerism. The language of capitalism is all they know.

The last intellectual to seriously address the damage done by corporations muscling in on social and personal space was Naomi Klein in her seminal 1999 book, No Logo. A mere twenty years later it is hard to believe that a book like that could become a bestseller today. Klein is a Gen Xer, and ours was the last generation that took a stand against commercialization of cultural life. The worst offense a Gen X cultural figure could do was to sell out. But “selling out” is not even in the millennial or Gen Z vocabulary. To those who have grown up in the world of Instagram and Kim Kardashian, one in which making it has never looked so easy and therefore easy to imitate, it’s all just selling: selling your merch, selling your “brand,” selling yourself. Cultural figures that can seriously talk about political and cultural change, the way Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana did in the ‘90s, that carved out space in the youth’s soul that was inaccessible to the language of capitalism, no longer exist. No such space is available to the youth of today, who have come to think that political change comes from wearing a hoodie with the right logo on it and that you can shop your way into sustainability, or anything else for that matter.

What we have forgotten is that corporations are in the business of making money, and not in one of curing social ills or producing culture. The former has traditionally been the job of the government, and it will remain so, despite the shifting narrative around its role and capability, and the latter should be left to the artists. Corporate “values” are a ruse. As Klein put it, “We don’t find community at Starbucks, a global commons through Cisco, or transcendence through Nike, just like we don’t find political engagement through Benetton.” Those values must come from within us, and through human language.

The last few years have been disorienting enough and the road out of the current mess is long and arduous. Maybe the first step on that road is to call things by their proper names.