The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers (40 page)

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised
for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
²⁵

Keynes’s description of “the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues” is one of the most accurate depictions of the cultural basis of Procrusteanism that I have seen.

Based on Keynes’s perspective, the prospects of a future that would satisfy him would make good Procrusteans shudder, especially because Keynes believed that working hours could dramatically shrink:

Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
²⁶

Keynes’s hundred-year estimate for the duration of the existing state proved overly optimistic. Unfortunately, in the more than three-quarters of a century that has passed since Keynes wrote, society seems to keep drifting further and further from the future he sketched.

Working hours keep increasing, and virtually everyone but the wealthy has an increasingly hard time making ends meet. In addition, global economic forces are making more and more people within the advanced market economies redundant, replacing them with much cheaper labor from the poorer regions of the world. Even people with professional skills are coming under intense pressure.

Reason should dictate that the people who are falling under the wheels of this juggernaut would question the prevailing Procrusteanism, but for the most part they have not yet succeeded in identifying their underlying problem. Alas, despite the fact that the existing economic system is not working for the benefit of the majority, Procrusteanism now has a tighter hold on society than Keynes could ever imagine.

The underlying force preventing the transition Keynes envisioned is not, as he thought, one of economic necessity, but rather a system of power and class, which consigns the majority of people to constrained lives that block the mobilization of their potential, whether to create a better way of life or to meet the growing challenges that endanger humanity.

Unless the people in power are willing to abandon the present system of class and control that hobbles society, ultimately even those whom the present system seems to benefit may well suffer the same fate as the admiral on the ill-fated ship who failed to heed a call from an ordinary member of the crew. Will the powers-that-be hang those future unauthorized navigators who report that the ship is off course?

What is needed to navigate the difficult waters that lie ahead is something entirely new—an equal opportunity social order that allows all people to develop their talents—a society that breaks down the mind-numbing confines of class. But what are the alternatives?

A Musical Interlude

A system as complex as a modern economy requires some system of coordination, but economics teaches that markets, without any external form of coordination, are the most efficient way of organizing an economy. In contrast, economics seems virtually unanimous that, within the economy as a whole, complex production units require top-down managerial controls. This book takes the position that neither markets nor managerial controls are particularly efficient and that cooperation offers a better alternative.

Calls for a cooperative organization of production will sound hopelessly utopian to some ears. The production of symphonic music, where a conductor prevents the musicians from creating a cacophony of sounds, is a common metaphor for the need for authority. Rarely have people raised the question of whether all that power and control is required. Even Karl Marx suggested the necessity of a conductor:

In all labour where many individuals cooperate, the interconnection and unity of the process is necessarily represented in a governing will, and in functions that concern not the detailed work but rather the workplace and its activity as a whole, as with the conductor of an orchestra.
²⁷

Certainly, the conductor presents an imposing figure:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. Every detail of his public behavior throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor. The reason why this has never been done is obvious: the music that a conductor evokes is thought to be the only thing that counts; people take it for granted that they go to concerts to hear symphonies and no-one is more convinced of this than the conductor himself. He believes that his business is to serve music and to interpret it faithfully.
²⁸

Surprisingly, conductors were a fairly new innovation at the time Marx was writing. Only a few decades before, conductors wielding a baton did not lead the orchestra. Instead, musicians themselves, usually the first violinist, took on that responsibility while they were performing. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all conducted their own works—often from the keyboard.

According to Urs Frauchiger, previously director of Bern’s music conservatory, the composer Carl Maria von Weber was the first to serve as a conductor standing in front of the musicians in a performance at Dresden in 1817. Later, Ludwig Spohr conducted a performance. Felix Mendelssohn soon followed.

The creation of the dictatorship of the conductor did not occur without resistance. The famous composer Robert Schumann protested that the conductor’s baton contradicted republican principles.
²⁹
Within a short time, republican principles were soon forgotten and the conductor became accepted as a central figure in symphonic productions.

One factor that promoted the role of the conductor was the development of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century. This genre
often involved more complexity, which reinforced the perceived need for a conductor. As Igor Stravinsky asserted:

It was Romantic music that unduly inflated the personality of the KAPELLMEISTER, even to the point of conferring upon him—along with the prestige that he today enjoys on his podium, which in itself concentrates attention upon him—-the discretionary power that he exerts over the music committed to his care. Perched on his sibylline tripod, he imposes his own movements, his own particular shadings upon the compositions he conducts, and he even reaches the point of talking with a naive impudence of his specialties, of HIS fifth, of HIS seventh, the way a chef boasts of a dish of his own concoction. Hearing him speak, one thinks of the billboards that recommend eating places to automobilists: “At so-and-so’s restaurant, his wines, his special dishes.”

There was never anything like it in the past, in times that nevertheless already knew as well as our time go-getting and tyrannical virtuosos, whether instrumentalists or prima donnas. But those times did not suffer yet from the competition and plethora of conductors, who almost to a man aspire to set up a dictatorship over music.
³⁰

Conducting Against Democracy

Something less romantic than Romanticism was also at work. In the United States during and after the Civil War, as larger-scale methods of production displaced the traditional craft and agrarian economies in the United States, the elites were accumulating enormous fortunes, often with questionable ethics.

They acquired a certain degree of respectability through philanthropy. Some chose to become patrons of the arts to advertise their culture as well as their wealth. These wealthy “philanthropists” provided the capital to erect symphony halls as new temples of culture, which stood as a boundary marking off the distance between the masters of Procrusteanism and ordinary people.

In Europe, the symphony orchestra had been a poor stepchild compared to the opera, which had a popular following.
³¹
Unlike today, the wealthy regarded opera as an excessively democratic art form. Ordinary people, without sufficient funds to purchase expensive instruments, could and often did sing the arias themselves.

In the United States, only a few decades earlier in 1842, symphonic music also had a democratic aura. The Philharmonic Society of New York was initially founded as a cooperative enterprise. The musicians elected the conductor, chose the repertory, and shared the receipts.
³²
The funders of this new symphonic music regarded such democratic rule as inappropriate.

In contrast, the patrons of U.S. symphonies wanted to promote “high culture,” which had the added attraction that it seemed to require the imposition of a strict hierarchy. They built “new temples exclusively for this orchestral music … a higher form of art, which (supposedly) reflected the moral character of the city.”
³³

Romantic music was ideal for the patrons of this “high culture.” The spirit of Romanticism elevated the undemocratic idea of the heroic creator who rose above the crowd. In a sense, this image of the composer parallels the later vision of the influential economist Joseph Schumpeter, who popularized the image of the heroic entrepreneur as a central figure in economic progress. These entrepreneurs create enormous value by developing new products or great efficiencies.
³⁴
Schumpeter’s idea became popular in the business press toward the end of the twentieth century, during the height of the dot-com boom.

In the United States, the expense of this capital-intensive system of production elevated the wealthy philanthropist as a heroic figure. As a symbol of this new musical mode of production, the conductor attained a position of great importance.

For example, when in 1906, Wilhelm Gericke resigned as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a Cleveland reporter commented on the enormity of the event: “In Boston the leader of the orchestra is a good deal bigger than the mayor.” Two years later, romantic composer Gustav Mahler advised Willem Mengelberg to accept the same job: “The Boston position is the finest imaginable
for a musician. An orchestra of the first rank. Unlimited sovereign power. A social standing such as the musician cannot obtain in Europe.”
³⁵
In effect, the nameless musicians were to go about their work under the close supervision of the conductor, culturally instructing the public about the correctness of this new phase of the capitalist mode of production.

In this new environment, “sacralization increased the distance between amateur and professional.” The popular “traditional practice of mixing musical genres and presenting audiences with an eclectic feast” became obsolete.
³⁶
After all, the symphonies could enjoy the support of wealthy patrons who often contributed their names as well as their money to the grand culture temples. Symphonies had no need to appeal to popular tastes. Besides, this kind of performance would be too expensive for popular audiences to support.

Even Marx thought that the role of the conductor revealed that the capitalist was an unnecessary figure in production of music:

Capitalist production has itself brought it about that the work of supervision is readily available, quite independent of the ownership of capital. It has therefore become superfluous for this work of supervision to be performed by the capitalist. A musical conductor need in no way be the owner of the instruments in his orchestra, nor does it form part of his function as a conductor that he should have any part in paying the “wages” of the other musicians.
³⁷

Some musical leaders are coming to question the dictatorship of the conductor. Leon Fleisher, a renowned pianist and conductor himself, now advocates a return to the earlier tradition.
The Economist
reported on Fliesher’s experience during a rehearsal of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, while working with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which functions without a conductor. Fleisher exclaimed, “This part is always screwed up with a conductor, but we’ve played it perfectly twice. This is proof that conductors should just sit down.”

The article cites Eric Bartlett, a cellist with both Orpheus and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, who described the lower level of
individual intensity in the latter organization: “If even a great conductor is empowered to make all the important decisions musicians start to play in a more passive way. Orpheus has removed a barrier between the audience and the music, the conductor himself.” The article concludes: “So why aren’t there more conductor-less orchestras? Star conductors sell more tickets than co-operatives.”
³⁸

Stravinsky observed how such commercial considerations reinforce this artistic dictatorship:

A quip that was passed on to me years ago clearly shows the importance which the conductor has come to take on in the preoccupations of the musical world. One day a person who presides over the fortunes of a big concert agency was being told about the success obtained in Soviet Russia by that famous conductorless orchestra of which we have already spoken: “That doesn’t make much sense,” declared the person in question, “and it doesn’t interest me. What I’d really be interested in is not an orchestra without a conductor, but a conductor without an orchestra.”
³⁹