Capitalism’s Character Types: the Globally Mobile Social Justice Warrior
The globally mobile — the upper-middle class American elite — have a character type, writes Ronald Dworkin in “Capitalism’s Character Types.” Dworkin describes the type as “the world-wise manager with a social conscience”: they favor more open immigration and identity politics generally, while opposing traditional morality and attachments to place and regional custom. But there is a hypocrisy inherent in that social justice ideology, which is that social justice, whether deliberately or not, serves to advance the interests of global capitalism, which empowers that same socially conscious elite.
This is not a small group of people Dworkin is writing about: he means almost the entirety of America’s upper-middle class of “technocrats, entrepreneurs, or the new leisure class,” comprising “sufficient numbers, influence, and wealth to control culture,” who are politically represented in American by “today’s Democratic Party, as well as the establishment wing of the Republican Party.” Either to “legitimate itself more broadly or simply to ease the conscience of its own elite,” its cultural contribution has the primary effect of rationalizing contemporary capitalism and cloaking its hypocrisies. The beliefs of the globally mobile are hypocritical because they use the language of social justice — LGBT, gender, and racial equality, alongside diversity and open borders — even while they represent the pinnacle of global capitalism: “a world without nations, without peoples; an entire world organized solely for production and consumption.”
Dworkin fills out this character type (which, important to note, is not meant to represent any individual, but a kind of representative average): “The globally mobile especially dislike patriotism, as national borders threaten the mass movement of peoples that global capitalism demands and expects… they call any person who resists mass immigration not a malingerer but instead a racist ‘deplorable.’” They embrace national-identity politics for immigrants, as it facilitates their movement in and out of the country, while vilifying national-identity politics for Americans, for the same reason. In this way, “group identity is separated from and placed in opposition to political sovereignty, turning identity into nothing more than a consumer choice.”
The globally mobile are feminists, too, at least in the sense that they “demand workers be shorn of their genders” and become indistinguishable as workers. This feminism can “serve a double purpose: [it can] deflect political attention away from issues of economic class while also providing an egalitarian rationale for the goals set out by contemporary business.” This feminism insists that women may only be empowered by participation in the global economy; by becoming part of a two-income household with the same earning power formerly possible in a one-income household; by having a “career.” It is a feminism too devoted to global capitalism to ask, as Wendell Berry once did:
“can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? And that question is made legitimate by another: How have men improved themselves by submitting to it? The answer is that men have not, and women cannot, improve themselves by submitting to it.”
And the globally mobile are politically correct. Politically incorrect speech “risks hurt feelings, lessened self-esteem, a hostile work environment, and other threats to productivity.” So businesses increasingly support speech codes and sensitivity trainings. According to Dworkin:
“Caring professionals think they are in the driver’s seat and are pushing business toward greater sensitivity and social awareness. In the same vein, academics think that they are in the driver’s seat, pushing business toward more political correctness. They are wrong. Business is in the driver’s seat, using a therapeutic and academic culture to stifle casual talk. Their motives may sometimes be genuine, but making the workplace more efficient and productive is a goal they cannot resist.”
So what can we learn from this description of the globally mobile character type? First, as Dworkin suggests, the character type’s multiple allegiances — to social justice and to global capitalism — are in conflict, and it is revealing when this ideological alliance breaks down.
Start with immigration. The net benefits of immigration seem undeniable—they make us richer by replacing an aging workforce and supplementing a barely growing population, and they bring new thinking and new energy into our society (nearly one-third of American winners of the Nobel Prize are foreign-born, for example).
But the benefits of immigration don’t accrue evenly. An explanation of the issue by the George W. Bush Center, titled “Benefits of Immigration Outweigh the Cost,” asks us “If immigration makes the economy larger, more efficient and productive, what’s the problem?” then answers its own question: “Research also suggests any negative wage effects are concentrated among low-skilled and not high-skilled workers… In other words, the immigration surplus does not accrue equally to everyone. It goes primarily to the owners of capital, which includes business and land-owners and investors.” But not to worry: we are assured that “No great change is without some short-term cost. What is costly in the long-term is preventing market forces from funneling resources to their best use.” Meanwhile low-skill immigration may also degrade work ethic among low-skill natives, in addition to decreasing social cohesion and straining local budgets.
In another political environment, it might be possible to discuss the differences between assimilating, high skill immigration — of the type that has made Indian-Americans into the wealthiest ethnic group in the U.S. — and non-assimilating, low-skill immigration, of the type that made a lot of people angry enough to vote for Donald Trump. My guess is that such a conversation would result in a public policy that limited low-skill immigration, to the benefit of ordinary people and to the harm of the globally mobile, while keeping high-skill immigration about the same as it is now. Instead, as Dworkin predicts, this conversation is short-circuited by the language of the globally mobile. Recently, former House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi called Donald Trump’s immigration proposal a plan to “Make America White Again,” merely because the plan proposed to enforce immigration laws that President Obama and a Democratic supermajority in Congress never bothered to change when they could have.
Even patriotism is thrown under the bus to save immigration and mobile labor. If you love your country like you love your favorite color, for no reason, completely aesthetically, this is irrational, and the globally mobile will tell you so. But if you have reasons for loving your country, it’s worse. Social justice shuts down this conversation by labeling opponents racist, and business wins by getting its cheap mobile labor. The role of social justice, then, is to cover business when its invisible hand is attacked for its social effects.
This all may sound awfully conspiratorial to many people. Dworkin thinks the hypocrisy — the global elite dressing up their own self-benefit as universal social justice — is convenient, but probably not conscious. But then what is the point? Why bother showing how these social movements benefit global capitalism if we can’t even show that global capital is doing it on purpose? Why bother blaming a faceless cosmopolitan elite for social movements that can be independently justified?
It shows what is at stake. Rational people can disagree as to the level of concern we should feel that social justice is the dominant belief among the globally mobile whose lives depend on global capitalism. But, if we assume forces of social justice operate to create a just world, and forces of global capitalism operate to create a “world organized solely for production and consumption,” then it should worry all of us that they are talking about the same world. If you don’t believe that re-orienting humanity for efficient production of goods and services promises good lives, then you should also be disturbed by a social movement that promises the same result and calls it justice.
Tying utopian social justice to dystopian consumerist hell may seem excessive, but it makes sense in light of the assumptions for human value shared by social justice and global capital. And they do share values — how else explain their sympathy? Maybe the global elite, out of some oligarch savior complex, have transformed themselves from greedy monsters — whose reckless disregard for the rest of humanity brought a devastating global recession a mere ten years ago — into disinterested missionaries of social progress and justice. The same people who demanded a separate entrance to the condo they are forced to share with low-income people have suddenly caught the justice bug and are advocating for paid family leave because it’s the “right thing to do.”
But I think that’s unlikely. Instead, this mutual sympathy between business and social justice evolved because both assign the same value to humans. In order to speak about justice without reference to any patriarchal religion’s idea of justice, social justice focuses on equality. But equality is meaningless in the abstract — it must be applied to something, and that something also needs to distance itself from any of the tainted “virtues” of Western Judeo-Christian thought. So social justice holds that all people must be alike in… not dignity, nor excellence, nor authenticity, nor purity, nor understanding, which are all tainted, but purchasing power. The value of a person, besides being inherent in every individual (and therefore meaningless), consists mainly in that person’s ability to buy things.
It’s true. Why does business support paid family leave? It might be the right thing to do, but it also prevents attrition by female workers. Three months of paid leave for new mothers is a bargain if it means the new mother returns to the workforce after twelve weeks instead of leaving for full-time motherhood. And while New York’s Governor Cuomo likes to say that family leave means not having to choose between caring for your new baby and paying your bills, the state doesn’t extend benefits to the self-employed. How do we really know it’s bad when a woman decides to raise children instead of working for a paycheck? She will be able to buy fewer things. We can see the same dynamic in immigration. Why is it good for a Haitian person to leave her family, language, and homeland and install her in America, a country founded on white supremacy and violence against black bodies like hers? She will be able to buy more things here. If there is another account of how she has improved herself that doesn’t use the word “resources,” it’s probably racist.
We should be bothered by this. It should worry us that the needs of a global capitalist system, which treats people as commodities and prefers that they are rootless and interchangeable, can equally serve a social justice end. We should be worried that we are endorsing social movements, in the name of justice, which make us more manageable, more predictable, and more dependent; more Walden II than Port Huron. Under this regime we have created a world where sex is fraught, friends are contingent, family is a burden, and religion is for bigots. What is left at the end of this but our wallets and our appetites?
Earlier iterations of upper-middle class character types faced these same questions, under much the same circumstances. The evil colonialists that we excoriate today didn’t think of themselves as evil; many of them thought Westernizing (Christianization with economic modernization) meant bringing truth and prosperity to the rest of the world. In 1857, British colonial officials and their families — many of whom considered themselves good people by the upper-middle class standards of the time — were massacred in Delhi by Indian soldiers mutinying against the British army. Tensions in the city had been high between Muslims and the British because of rumors that the army’s new cartridge packets, which had to be torn open with one’s teeth, were coated in haram pig lard. Meanwhile, tensions between Hindus and the British were also high, in part because the British had banned sati, the practice of immolating widows simultaneously with their dead husbands. Ignoring the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny, though, how likely are today’s socially just to morally side with the colonizers even on the issue of widow burning? Not very — social justice today knows colonialism is always evil, while global capital knows colonialism is pointless when people can migrate to wherever capital needs them.
So how will the future judge the effects of today’s crop of good people and our current truth-bringing activities? If history is predictive, we will not be judged by our good intentions. We will not be praised for thousands of distinct cultures obliterated by a global consumerist monoculture; we will not be thanked for a work environment that stifles individuality in the name of equality, and then demands that our entire lives become work; we will not be admired for the genius of our marketing innovations or for the beauty of our individually curated consumption. They will call us monsters, who absurdly demanded to have everything and to be happy about it too.
