The New Prophets of Capital (4 page)

Things worked out great for Jen Holleran, but the position she leaned into undermines the position of hundreds of other women—Newark school teachers. A core goal of Startup: Education was to institute a merit pay program for Newark's teachers. The program, which Sandberg played a central role in designing, rewarded “highly effective” teachers who produced high standardized test scores with bonuses while simultaneously putting teachers whose students performed poorly on track for disciplinary action or dismissal.
³⁵

Hundreds of teachers who have been deemed “unsatisfactory” are being kept on payroll as substitute teachers and rotated between Newark's seventy schools while city officials and Newark school reformers use Startup and other funds to develop a buyout program similar to programs used in New York and Houston. The long-term goal is to reduce the number of tenured teachers, keep the remaining ones on their toes with merit pay and weakened tenure rights, and bring in new short-term teachers through programs like Teach For America.

Jen Holleran achieved success at work and fulfillment at home, but her personal gain came at the expense of other women trying to defend their own gains and improve their schools in a complex, difficult environment. Her story highlights how the pursuit of individual success within the existing structures of social and economic power can be great for one woman, but on a broader scale undermine the struggles of other women and bolster the gendered and racialized division of labor in our society.

Feminism as Ideology: The Need for a Collective Vision

The enthusiasm of Fortune 500 companies like Walmart (a company sued for discrimination against women) for the
Lean In
message demonstrates how neatly Sandberg's story dovetails with companies' desire to have bright, hard-working, ambitious employees. Women's success makes the existing agenda of corporate power appear both just and justified. By providing a pathway for women to advance and mouthing their support for vague notions of gender equality, companies, and the broader capitalist economy, appear meritocratic and even benevolent—a place where anyone (man or woman) who works hard enough will succeed.

As we have seen over the past three decades of neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization, the tendency within capitalism is to polarize not unite, to create divisions not equality. Capitalism has inherent contradictions that pit workers against the companies that employ them and against each other. Workers' wages come directly from the profits of companies. When competition between firms increases (as it always does) companies look to their wage bill for savings by paying their workers less, slashing their benefits, and making them work harder and longer.

Meanwhile, capital feeds on existing norms of sexism and racism, compounding the exploitative nature of wage work. When women's ambitions and desires are silenced or undervalued, they are easier to take advantage of. Sexism and racism are part of the company toolkit, enabling firms to pay women less—particularly women of color—discriminate against them, steal their wages, and treat them badly. But even if we root out sexism and racism, the inherent contradictions of capitalism will persist. Putting women in charge will not change the power of the profit motive and the compulsion of companies to give workers as little as economic, social, and cultural norms will allow.

The goal of feminism is justice and equality for all women, not simply equal opportunity for women or equal participation by women. By aligning the goals of feminism with the goals of capitalism, Sandberg's model of emancipation functions as ideology, accepting and undergirding the dominant structures of power in society. Her critique of gender inequality in elite jobs, while accurate and thoughtful, glorifies the capitalist work ethic by pushing women to seek self-actualization through self-exploitation. Women who follow her action plan may achieve more success in their careers, and perhaps even reach the heights that Sandberg herself has gained. But her plan will help only a small number of women—the women who can find a place within the limited number of power positions in the corporate hierarchy. Everyone else—the domestic workers, retail staff, caregivers—will remain excluded, their efforts undermined by the strengthening of capital and the women who burnish its meritocratic facade.

At the same time, alternative visions will be silenced. Sandberg's power as a billionaire prophet with access to an enormous media empire allows her voice and vision to dominate the limited space available in public discussions about women, drowning out radical stories that challenge the status quo and call attention to how class, race, and gender intersect to create deep disparities in wealth and well-being in our society.

Sandberg is right that women hold themselves back as a result of patriarchal norms that push them to be caring and nice. Women do need to stop worrying about being perfect mothers/wives/daughters. Women do need to take the lead and enter positions of power. This part of her story needs to be shared and internalized. But Sandberg's version of leaning in reinforces the fundamentally exploitative social relations that characterize our society and strengthen a system that permanently divides women at the top from women at the bottom.

If we truly want to realize the goals of our mothers and sisters struggling through the ages and make the world a better place for women, we need to lean in to campaigns and projects that challenge existing structures of power. If we're going to improve women's lives we need to help them organize their workplaces. While it might work for some women (like Sandberg) to focus on individual strategies to get ahead in their jobs, the only way most women are going to get sick days, family leave, health insurance, or a raise is through a collective bargaining agreement organized with other workers, not “trickle-down feminism.”
³⁶
Women must lean in to collective projects that unite women in spirit and purpose, projects that channel individual female voices into a deafening roar for true feminism, projects that give women the power to change the world, to make it a better place for all people.

________

1
Sheryl Sandberg,
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

2
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 146–7, 63, 157–8.

3
Miguel Helft, “Sheryl Sandberg: The Real Story,”
Forbes
, October 10, 2013.

4
Ibid.

5
These data come from an excellent two-part article by Gerald Friedman, “The Wages of Gender,” in
Dollars and Sense
, September/October 2013 and November/December 2013.

6
Jodi Kantor, “Harvard Business School Case Study: Gender Equity,”
New York Times
, September 7, 2013.

7
See
www.domesticworkers.org
for a series of reports and analyses.

8
Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997 [1963], p. 164.

9
Friedan,
Feminine Mystique
, p. 296.

10
Sandberg,
Lean In
, p. 9.

11
Ibid., p. 17.

12
Ibid., p. 23.

13
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 24–5.

14
Ken Auletta, “A Woman's Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley's Male-Dominated Culture?”
New Yorker
, July 11, 2011.

15
Sandberg,
Lean In
, p. 58.

16
Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,”
New Left Review
2: 56, 2009, 98.

17
Sarah Jaffe, “Trickle-Down Feminism,”
Dissent
, Winter 2013. bell hooks also criticized Sandberg for privileging a white, heteronormative vision of relationships and family.

18
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 8–9.

19
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 8–9.

20
Ibid., p. 7.

21
Ibid., pp. 4, 7, 11.

22
Yvonne Roberts, “Mentoring Scheme Gives Women Keys to Gates of Power,
Guardian
, September 18, 2013.

23
Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,”
Atlantic
, June 13, 2012.

24
Ibid.

25
Jennifer Skalka Tulumello, “Hillary Clinton Makes a Splash in Chicago, But Not an Overtly Political One,”
Christian Science Monitor
, June 13, 2013.

26
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 171–2.

27
Kara Swisher, “‘Physically Together': Here's the Internal Yahoo No-Work-from-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More,”
All Things D
, February 22, 2–13.

28
Susan Faludi, “Sandberg Left Single Mothers Behind,”
CNN Opinion
, March 13, 2013.

29
Kate Losse, “Feminism's Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning In?”
Dissent
, March 26, 2013.

30
Sandberg,
Lean In
, pp. 133–4.

31
Weeks,
The Problem with Work
, p. 152.

32
Ibid., p. 54.

33
Maya Tokumitsu, “In the Name of Love,”
Jacobin
13, 2013.

34
Sandberg,
Lean In
, p. 117.

35
Jenny Brown, “Lean In or Stand Up,”
Labor Notes
, November 4, 2013.

36
Marilyn Sneiderman, quoted in Jaffe,
Dissent
, 2013.

John Mackey spent his formative years trying to divine the purpose of his life. After much soul-searching and lots of reading, he made an important decision: come hell or high water “he would follow his heart wherever it led him.” Since 1980 his heart has led him to create and run Whole Foods Market—“a store that sells healthy food to people and provides good jobs.” More recently, Mackey has embarked on a grander mission: “to liberate the extraordinary power of business and capitalism to create a world in which all people live lives full of prosperity, love, and creativity—a world of compassion, freedom, and prosperity.”
¹

Mackey is not your typical CEO. He hasn't taken a paycheck for more than six years. He has also donated all his recent stock options to Whole Planet, a Whole Foods nonprofit that provides start-up microloans to poor people (primarily women) in more than fifty developing countries. Mackey drives his early model Prius to work every day on a mission: He wants the planet to eat better, and he wants to teach other entrepreneurs the secrets of “conscious capitalism.” He believes that if businesspeople, and society more broadly, realize the incredible power of “conscious” businesses to create value and heal the planet, we can reverse the missteps of the past few decades.

A growing consensus is emerging that the spread of global capitalism, while profitable for some people and institutions, is seriously harming poor people and the planet itself. Rising inequality and environmental degradation are bringing into question capitalism's ability to produce secure livelihoods without destroying the planet in the process. Mackey thinks the behavior of capitalists hasn't helped matters. He believes businesses that focus on short-term profits rather than long-term growth do more harm than good and give capitalism a bad name. Instead, companies need to break free from this model and reveal the “beautiful,” “heroic” spirit of free-market capitalism. Companies that have a mission and passionately follow it by encouraging creativity and honoring all stakeholders (customers, workers, suppliers, investors, communities, and the environment) are what society needs to solve the problems of environmental degradation and social inequality and restore the image of capitalism.

This mission has transformed Whole Foods into something bigger than pyramids of shiny pink ladies and regiments of straight-shooting asparagus. The company donates 5 to 10 percent of its profits every year to nonprofits like the Whole Kids program, an initiative designed to improve nutrition and wellness for schoolchildren. Whole Kids puts salad bars in schools, provides nutrition information to school staff, and funds school garden projects; elementary schools in numerous states, including California, Alabama, Ohio, and Oregon, have planted school gardens through the program. Its Whole Cities program is tackling the challenge of urban “food deserts” by providing grants and educational resources to community groups in cities like New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi. Whole Foods is also a leader in the supermarket field on the ethical treatment of animals: It is a member of the Global Animal Partnership and claims that it uses a rigorous, five-step rating system to promote ethical animal agricultural practices.
²

Whole Foods' “core values” extend beyond philanthropic gestures and selling ethically produced, organic food. The company says that it seeks to honor all stakeholders from suppliers to communities, and from workers to the environment. It provides logistical support and low-interest loans to “independent, local farms” and “food artisans,” and gives small businesses a platform for increasing sales through its stores. In a retail world dominated by low-road employers like Walmart and McDonalds, Whole Foods bucks the trend by offering higher wages, a decent health care plan, and a voice to workers to improve their workplace. Leadership structures are decentralized, giving local stores and individual “team members” more autonomy in organizing work patterns, and all workers have access to the company's employment statistics. They can see how much every person in the company, including Mackey himself, makes. And, while the salaries of US corporate executives have skyrocketed over the past two decades, the company has restrained executive pay to nineteen times the average pay of all team members ($18 an hour for full-time, permanent employees). By comparison, in 2011 Apple's Tim Cook took home $378 million in salary, stock, and other benefits, which was 6,258 times the pay of an average Apple employee.

How can Whole Foods do all these things and remain profitable in the cutthroat food industry, where most food retailers make profits of pennies on the dollar? Although Whole Foods saw a temporary dip in profits following the 2008 financial crisis, Mackey attributes the long-term prosperity of the company to its conscious growth model. He believes that the model has led to a different kind of enterprise, one able to withstand the storms of competition through creativity and innovation. By honoring all its stakeholders, Whole Foods creates an “operating system” that is “in harmony with the fundamentals of human nature” and the planet.
³

Mackey is not alone. His 2013 book,
Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
(co-authored with Raj Sisodia), is a
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
bestseller.
Forbes
calls it an inspiration for CEOs, and Oprah featured the book on her Super Soul Sunday show. Other companies and entrepreneurs have joined the “conscious capitalism” movement.
⁴
They argue that the old business paradigms based on zero-sum thinking are not working. If society is to avoid the devastating environmental and social effects of the current trajectory it needs to take a different path. Mackey believes that this is starting to happen, and though this nascent philosophy of capitalism is in its early stages, the direction is clear: “If your company doesn't care, it will not be in business for long.”
⁵

The Anthropocene Era

For the past thirty years companies have been told that their only social responsibility is to make a profit. In this ideological context, recent moves by mega-corporations like Kraft, Walmart, McDonalds, Hewlett-Packard, Nordstrom, Nestlé, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and many more to scrutinize their supply chains and speed their adoption of sustainable practices is surprising and indicates growing concerns about the current global model of extraction, production, distribution, and consumption.

In 1972 researchers at MIT published their eye-opening study
The Limits to Growth
. The project used computer simulations to demonstrate the potentially devastating impact of exponential capitalist growth in a closed system with finite resources. Examining growth trends in human population, industrialization, pollution, and resource depletion, the report's authors suggested possible scenarios of “overshoot and collapse” in the global system by the middle of the twenty-first century. In the decades since, a shared global consciousness has emerged that humans are destroying the planet. Some scientists have even started referring to the time since the rise of industrial capitalism as the Anthropocene era, arguing that humans are altering the planet in ways similar to major geological events in the past.

Apocalyptic predictions about the effects of global warming have become a news staple as groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council broadcast a steady stream of warnings about a future plagued by droughts, typhoons, fires, and floods. Freshwater bodies like the Ogallala Aquifer (beneath the Great Plains in the United States) and the Aral Sea (between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) are being rapidly depleted, and scientists estimate that 40 percent of the ocean's waters are “heavily affected” by human activities. Overuse of water is matched by dramatic transformations in the planet's cultivable land area. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, 30 percent of the Earth's land is now devoted to supporting livestock for consumption. Extinction rates for wild animals are hundreds and even thousands of times higher than “background rates” in the fossil record, with large predators most threatened. Scientists estimate that the wild population of vertebrates has declined 30 percent since 1970, mainly due to habitat loss.
⁶

Westerners have a particularly large ecological footprint. US consumers ranked last in a seventeen-country survey of sustainable behavior conducted by National Geographic. Despite having only 5 percent of the global population, the United States accounts for 25 percent of the world's coal consumption, 26 percent of oil, and 27 percent of natural gas. Our homes and cars are bigger, and per capita we consume more than anyone else on the planet. Thanks to household water use (flushing toilets, washing clothes) and “embodied” water in food production (like coffee and meat), a child born in the United States uses 30 to 50 times more water than a child born in a developing country and creates 13 times more ecological damage in the course of her lifetime. One American adult drains more resources than 35 Indians and buys 53 times more goods and services than someone in China.
⁷

Outsized consumption patterns are only a part of the problem. Many environmental groups blame dominant conceptions of economic growth that focus on gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of prosperity without considering the effects of constantly expanding production and consumption on the environment. Groups like Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network argue that the unfettered access of transnational corporations to the riches of the planet—underwritten by institutions like the World Trade Organization—is destroying the world's air, water, and land.

“
Maligned” and “Misunderstood”: It's Not Capitalism's Fault!

Mackey agrees that the destructive actions of big corporations obsessed with the bottom line have damaged the environment, but he vehemently denies that the problem is capitalism. Mackey argues that true capitalism, or free-enterprise capitalism (free markets + free people), is a unique, inherently virtuous system that, properly harnessed, can heal the planet.

Critics of capitalism say it is an exploitative, zero-sum system in which the riches of some depend on the impoverishment of others. Mackey disagrees. He argues that capitalism is actually based on freedom, not coercion or exploitation. It is a system in which “people trade voluntarily for mutual gain.” Workers, customers, investors, and suppliers all have the freedom to trade with whomever they wish. If people don't like what a company sells, they can shop elsewhere. If workers don't like the way a company treats its employees, they can find a different job. But when investors, labor, management, and suppliers choose to cooperate, they can create unprecedented value. In a free market, this joint value is “divided fairly among the creators of the value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes. In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. It is a win, win, win, win game.”
⁸

Sure, companies have been misbehaving recently, but before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, Mackey implores us to remember that most of the wonderful things we have in the world, like cars, computers, antibiotics, and the internet, are a product of free markets, not “government edict.” The “wondrous technologies that have shrunk time and distance” and freed us from “mindless drudgery” have become possible only because of free market capitalism—“unquestionably the greatest system for innovation and social cooperation that has ever existed.”
⁹

Instead of blaming capitalism for inequality and environmental degradation, Mackey suggests that we should look at the actions of governments. Departing from the dominant idea that states have retreated from the market over the past three decades, Mackey argues states have become more interventionist than ever, and that in the process they have “fostered a mutant form of capitalism called crony capitalism” that is to blame for many of the problems societies face today. Mackey does not see crony capitalism as “real” capitalism. Instead it is a product of big government in which politicians trying to preserve their cushy jobs develop symbiotic, parasitic relationships with businesspeople too lazy or unimaginative to compete successfully in the marketplace.
¹⁰

In Mackey's story, crony capitalism has been exacerbated by the rising power of the financial sector and shareholder-value ideology—the idea that firms are nothing more than a stream of assets designed to maximize profits for shareholders. Mackey argues that this obsession with greed and profits has “robbed most businesses of their ability to engage and connect with people” and has created “long-term systemic problems” that destroy profitability and that can be deeply damaging to people and to the planet. “Too many businesses fail to recognize the significant impacts they have on the environment, on other creatures that inhabit the planet (such as wildlife and livestock animals), and on the physical health and psyches of team members and customers.”
¹¹

Instead of trying to get a handout from the government or make a quick buck on the stock market, Mackey says that companies need to roll up their sleeves and rethink how to run a business. The first thing they need to do is to realize that a business is a “social system,” not a hierarchy.
¹²
Everyone matters. A company can squeeze its workers or screw over its suppliers to get a bump in quarterly sales and a boost in share price. With luck, it might rake in profits for quite a while by taking these shortcuts, but in the long run it will lose and harm everyone and everything around it.

The Consumer-Citizen

Mackey's vision of a helping, healing company has been embraced by Whole Foods consumers and has generated an extremely devoted customer base. In a recent survey, US and Canadian consumers ranked Whole Foods first among stores providing healthy, high-quality food.
¹³
One of Mackey's favorite memories is the support and encouragement he received from customers and neighbors after a massive flood all but destroyed the first Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas, in 1981. The flood left the store under eight feet of dirty water, ruining all the inventory and equipment inside and, it seemed at the time, Mackey's dreams. But after the water receded, dozens of loyal customers showed up, unbeckoned, with mops and buckets ready to help get the store up and running again because they loved it so much. The company is no less popular today. It relies heavily on word-of-mouth advertising, and even in a food mecca like New York City, customers lined up around the block to enter Whole Foods' 59,000-square-foot mega-store in Columbus Circle when it opened in 2003.