The New Prophets of Capital (9 page)

In response to these dramatic shifts in the labor market, groups like the Freelancers Union have emerged. The Freelancers Union (formerly Working Today) was founded by Sarah Horowitz in 2001 and represents almost a quarter-million freelancers: writers, photographers, web designers, and other hard-up creative class comrades. Horowitz was named one of the 30 Top Social Entrepreneurs by
Forbes
and a Top 25 Most Promising Social Entrepreneur by
Businessweek
. The Freelancers Union offers health and pension insurance to qualified members, has successfully fought to reduce taxes on freelancers, and has introduced legislation to protect freelancers from deadbeat clients.
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In its focus on self-adjustment, gratitude, and service, the strategy presented by the Freelancers Union echoes Oprah's message. The union's website offers tips for branding yourself (be likable, tell a story, be personal, be memorable). It urges freelancers to think of building social capital as opening “your love bank account” instead of just networking—success comes from first asking “what can I give?” It also offers guidance: What should you do when you hit a dry patch and have no work? Network (of course). Clean your desk: “You'll be surprised by how a clean, tidy desk will affect your productivity.” Add skills: “You can never have too many skills. Maybe it's time to learn how to write code, market more effectively, or use Photoshop. The more skills you have, the more marketable you'll be.” Evaluate your business model: “Have you been undercharging?” Want to grow as a freelancer? “Reinvent yourself,” “productize your services,” and “elevate your stature.” If you don't like being a freelancer and are just doing it to eat, you should consider “finding the perfect full-time job.”
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In the Freelancers Union model contingent work becomes desirable, a choice that offers freedom and autonomy. “Freelancers are changing the definition of success. It's no longer about the corner office in a soulless glass tower. It's about building and sharing real value together—investing in time, community, and well-being.” The group sees this more “mindful approach to work” as a “pyramid of self-actualization.” At the bottom of the pyramid are the stressedout, struggling “unfree” freelancers, followed by the slightly better off, but probably still surviving on ramen (or the trust fund), “hustling” freelancers. Moving up past the “empowered” and the “influential” freelancers we reach the top: the “360 degrees Freelancer.” But the pinnacle isn't about money, status, or applause. “It's about giving back.”
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The Freelancers Union is part of an emerging social movement called “new mutualism” that's grounded in the concept of a sharing economy. Jeremy Rifkin sees the sharing economy as the next big thing. He argues that hundreds of millions of people are already on board, sharing “information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D printed products at near-zero marginal cost.” People are also sharing more personal things like clothes, homes, and household items.
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“Flexible,” “diversified” freelancers are the archetypal sharers:

They mentor. They give without asking what they get. They see an opportunity and bring people together to seize it. But, most important, they're seeing beyond today. They know that the future will look very different than the present—and they're getting ready for it. Maybe they're part of a small cooperative of graphic designers who band together to help market each other and keep costs down. Or they make sure they buy from and work with other local freelancers to keep the ecosystem healthy. They buy their groceries at the local food co-op. They attend classes. They teach classes. They go to networking events not just to hand out business cards, but to find other freelancers that share their passions.
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In the new sharing economy we'll all be freelancers. We'll rent out our spare rooms on Airbnb and drive our cars for Lyft. We'll have a “portfolio of jobs” and live our lives by “essentialist” principles: We will live with “intention and choice” and celebrate the joy of “fulfilling a purpose” and making “small choices that lead to big change.”
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It's all about adapting ourselves and acquiring the necessary skills and connections to make it in the world. This is the new American Dream. Sure, there are problems in society, but we don't need to change the world. We just need to change ourselves and the problems will disappear.

Reconsidering the American Dream

Renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills once said that “by the fact of [our] living [we] contribute, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of history, even as [we are] made by society and by its historical push and shove.” The interplay of biography and history is central: To comprehend the possibilities for individuals we must look beyond their personal stories and milieus and situate them within the economic and political structures of the society they live in. One can “know their own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in their circumstances.”
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Oprah is appealing precisely because her stories hide the role of political, economic, and social structures. Instead of examining the interplay of biography and history, they eliminate it, making structure and agency indistinguishable. In doing so, they make the American Dream seem attainable. If we just fix ourselves, we can achieve our goals. For some people the American Dream is attainable, but to understand the chances for everyone, we need to look dispassionately at the factors that shape success.

The current incarnation of the American Dream narrative holds that if you acquire enough cultural capital (skills and education) and social capital (connections, access to networks) you will be able to translate that capital into both economic capital (cash money) and happiness. Cultural capital and social capital are seen as there for the taking (particularly with advances in internet technology), so the only additional necessary ingredients are pluck, passion, and persistence—all attributes that allegedly come from inside us.

The renowned French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was very interested in the nature of capital. He saw the social world as a web of social relations whose dimensions were the result of “accumulated history,” so that the social relations that constitute society do not appear and disappear spontaneously, nor are they random or equal. Instead, the social relations of society are shaped by power, and in particular, by the accumulation of capital. Bourdieu argued that capital accumulation

is what makes the games of society—not least, the economic game—something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one's social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winnings of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one … and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.
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Bourdieu rejected this roulette image of social relations. He argued that the unequal ability of people from different socio-economic backgrounds to accumulate capital—economic, social, cultural—shapes their life chances profoundly and ensures that some will succeed while others will not. Though our society professes to be a competitive meritocracy—a “universe … of perfect opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity, or acquired properties”—Bourdieu argued that, in nearly every instance, one's access to economic, cultural, and social capital determines success, not gumption and grit.

Social and cultural capital are forms of capital just like economic capital. They can be achieved as an end in themselves (for fun or edification or both), but their historical purpose has always been to protect wealth, help in the competition for wealth, and identify insiders (the rich) and outsiders (the riffraff). The American Dream is premised on the assumption that if you work hard economic opportunity will present itself and financial stability will follow, but the role of cultural and social capital in paving the road to wealth and fulfillment, or blocking it, may be just as important as economic capital. Some people are able to translate their skills, knowledge, and connections into economic opportunity and financial stability, and some are not—either because their skills, knowledge, and connections don't seem to work as well, or they can't acquire them in the first place because they're too poor.

Today, the centrality of social and cultural capital is obscured (sometimes deliberately), as demonstrated in the implicit and explicit message of Oprah and her ideological colleagues. In their stories, and many others like them, cultural and social capital are easy to acquire. They tell us to get an education. Too poor? Take an online course. Go to Khan Academy. They tell us to meet people, build up our network. Don't have any connected family members? Join LinkedIn. It's simple. Anyone can become anything. There's no distinction between the quality and productivity of different people's social and cultural capital. We're all building our skills. We're all networking. All types of social and cultural capital are equally translatable into economic capital (and happiness), and social and cultural capital will retain their value no matter how many people acquire them.

This is a fiction. If all or most forms of social and cultural capital were equally valuable and accessible—as the hegemonic narrative tells us they are—we should see the effects of this in increased upward mobility and wealth created anew by new people in each generation rather than passed down and expanded from one generation to the next. The data do not demonstrate this upward mobility. The United States, in a sample of thirteen wealthy countries, ranks highest on inequality and lowest on intergenerational earnings mobility.
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Wealth isn't earned fresh in each new generation by plucky go-getters. It is passed down, preserved, and expanded through generous tax laws and the assiduous transmission of social and cultural capital.

Rich people's social and cultural capital is simply much more productive than the capital of the middle-class and working class. “Between 1979 and 2007 the top 1 percent of earners saw their after tax incomes rise 275 percent. The middle 60 percent saw their after-tax incomes rise 40 percent.” Since the Great Recession the top 1 percent has grabbed 95 percent of the income gains. Rich people distinguish themselves and protect their wealth by using their power to reproduce themselves through massive investments in their children starting
in utero
. They use their social connections and wealth to write and pass legislation, open doors, navigate the corridors of power, and provide an elite education and robust safety net for their children. The internet, social networking, and rags-to-riches stories don't change these facts. Going to State University and stalking potential employers on LinkedIn is not equivalent to going to Harvard and having a CEO for an uncle. As economist Thomas Picketty has shown, the rich are getting richer and will in all likelihood—given the current relationship between returns on capital and economic growth—get even richer.
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The middle class is slipping and trying desperately to stick its foot in the closing door to wealth and power. But as more and more people compete to acquire the same social and cultural capital, the more each person needs ever greater amounts of social and cultural capital, and the less that social and cultural capital is worth.

The mind-cure stories that people like Oprah tell us say this isn't the case. Social and cultural capital are there for the taking if we want them and try for them. The real barriers are inside us, so we should focus on the inside stuff, be grateful for adversity, give back, and, most important, learn to think differently about the world so we can seize the opportunities waiting for us. But in a system stacked against everyone but the wealthiest, the inside stuff is often all we are left with.

Jennifer Silva, a sociologist at Harvard, studies working-class youth and their coming-of-age experiences. Working-class youth today are cut off from the markers of adulthood expected by their parent's generation. Most of them will never enjoy the traditional rites of passage (house, steady job, family) essential to the American Dream. Silva finds that, nonetheless, they have internalized the therapeutic, self-actualization, inside-stuff narrative, just like their middle-class counterparts. The narrative helps them deal with their shattered dreams and “ascribe meaning and order to the flux and uncertainty of their lives.” However, “this alternative, therapeutic coming of age story ends not with marriage, home ownership, and a career, but with self-realization gleaned from denouncing a painful past and reconstructing an independent complete self.”
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It is from this vantage point that we can also understand the anger at gatherings like Occupy Wall Street. Occupy comprised primarily young, middle-class twenty-somethings who have done nothing but passionately pursue social and cultural capital in the hopes of landing their dream job, but who have little to show for it except a mountain of student loan debt and a job at Banana Republic.
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Opportunities for economic advancement aren't unlimited and open to all. They are strictly regulated and open to a (relative) few, mainly the wealthy, and as wealth becomes more concentrated economic opportunities contract.

The way we are told to get through it all and realize our dreams is always to adapt ourselves to the changing world, not to change the world we live in. We demand little or nothing from the system, from the collective apparatus of powerful people and institutions. We only make demands of ourselves. We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects.