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For several months now I've been wanting to read Anand Giridharadas' Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which I believe I first spotted at Harvard Book Store and was like "Damn, this sounds Relevant To My Interests." Further relevance to my interests was confirmed when Giridharadas was interviewed on Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening podcast; the episode, called Myths of the Ruling Class, is definitely worth a listen — the subject matter of Winners Take All dovetails nicely with that of Hayes' Twilight of the Elites, and it's always nice when a liberal with a large platform kicks off a show with "There's a concept in Marxist theory..." and goes not to not say anything disparaging or stupid. 

 

It has taken me several months to read this book because apparently everybody else in Boston wants to read it, too; I reserved it earlier this year and was something like #57 on 14 copies. I have tried to hold my annoyance and my budget and remind myself that it is Good that lots of people want to learn about why Goldman Sach's commitment to reducing income inequality is garbage (besides "uh, obviously"). I have been tiding myself over by reading a lot of Giridharadas' articles, of which there are many of late, and tweets, which are funny. 

 

Anyway. Winners Take All is about a nefarious scam commonly known as "philanthropy." The nefariousness of philanthropy by avowedly right-wing nutjobs is something well covered in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, but this focuses on the more insidious nefariousness of "liberal" or even "social-justice-oriented" philanthropy, the kind of stuff that is at least nominally dedicated to progressive causes like women's equality or ending poverty. Big names in this kind of philanthrocapitalism include Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and even some people not named Bill. 

 

The elite culture that drives the gospel of "doing well by doing good" (i.e., "social entrepreneurship," and not to be confused with "doing good by doing well," the mantra of a weird offshoot called Effective Giving), a network of conferences, foundations, corporate social responsibility projects, platforms for "thought leadership," and NGOs, is dubbed MarketWorld, and it traces the most notable parts of its intellectual lineage to the birth of neoliberalism is the '80s. (Other parts of its intellectual lineage trace to the robber barons in the first Gilded Age, technologically updated to meet the needs of the robber barons of the second.) At core, it's an elaborate belief structure designed to provide justification for no-holds-barred, white-knuckle imperialist capitalism for people who hold nominally equitably-minded moral sensibilities by, essentially, recasting capital accumulation and wealth hoarding as a sort of class-free, universally beneficial "development" and a necessary precondition for ensuring that the "best" people to solve social problems have the resources to do so. Under the myth of meritocracy — and especially under the myth of business meritocracy, where expertise is transitive as long as that expertise is in wealth extraction — people who become rich are assumed to be the best people to solve social problems because they are considered the best and brightest and most innovative etc. etc. generally, rather than as being the best and brightest at getting rich. 

 

Now, if you hang about on the grassroots left at all, as I do, or on the academic left, as I do, or otherwise don't get invited to fancy conferences like Davos, as I don't, the idea that rich people might be bad at things that have nothing to do with getting rich probably isn't a huge shocker. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the self-serving, insular logic of MarketWorld as obviously a crock, because it's incredibly influential for many other people who have no hope of ever getting invited to Davos. How many petit bourgeois or even regular working stiffs watch TED talks? A lot; all you need to watch a TED talk is the internet, and while there are certainly still people who don't have the internet, the "digital divide" isn't exactly the 99% vs. the 1% (in the U.S., about 12% of the population doesn't have internet access). It's still sort of culturally coded as a bit bougie, but bougie cultural coding extends far further down the class ladder than, say, ownership of the means of production. The vehicle by which MarketWorld's ideas are laundered into the public consciousness until they become "common sense" is called "thought leadership," and it basically means that ideas that rich people like get major subsidies in the supposedly free market of ideas. It is why more people know who Malcolm Gladwell is than they do Erik Olin Wright. It is why people are more likely to think of Sheryl Sandberg, who as far as I know isn't even a feminist or at least has never written a book about feminism, when they hear the phrase "feminist writer" than they are Silvia Federici. A lot of MarketWorld's ideology, because it comes from and slots so neatly into myths about individualism and merit that are such a deep part of the American psyche anyway, become pop culture very easily. Another important part of MarketWorld ideology is mandatory positivity, or "win-win thinking." Perhaps once a challenge to think creatively and not just assume everything is zero-sum — a habit of thought it was once easy to develop in business, because capitalist competition usually is zero-sum — "win-win" thinking has now become a mandatory limitation on actual cognition, where negative consequences are simply denied and focusing on actual problems long enough to figure out how to fix them is considered "negative" and thus taboo. Instead of trying to come up with solutions that don't fuck people over, the fucking over of regular people is simply disappeared, and the priority is to avoid upsetting any of the people important enough to be in the conversation. 

 

The result is a massive hamstringing of public discourse, where perfectly reasonable and fact-based suggestions for improving the world by in any way reining in the damage done by unelected and unaccountable plutocrats and putting the public good back in the hands of the public are considered absolutely bonkers pie-in-the-sky daydreams fit only for stinky hippies and left-edgelords in Che Guevara t-shirts. 

 

But the facade of capability is cracking as the world continues to hurtle towards staggering wealth inequality and civilization-ending ecocatastrophe. MarketWorlders are confused and conflicted about why everyone's so mad at them, even though they give lots of money to supposedly fixing the problems they cause, just because the problems aren't fixed yet. And on top of that, all the people who aren't important enough to be the rooms where the decision-making happens have started coming up with all these conspiracy theories about how decision-making happens, and man, the shit they guess at just because the reality has been carefully excised from the public square and stuck behind a paywall is bananas, see, this just proves you can't let stupid normal people make decisions. It is in this atmosphere of injured petulance that a whole bunch of these folks decided to sit down with a New York Times journalist and pour their hearts out. 

Granted, not everyone Giridharadas sits down with is a hack; quite a lot of them aren't and are quite aware that something is not right. One of the first people we run into is Hilary Cohen, a bright young Georgetown grad whose completely correct instincts that going to work for a big financial services company might not be as much of an actual public service as going into public service would be are relentlessly ground down until she is seduced into a position with McKinsey & Company, after going through several other rounds of "learn business because social justice" propagandizing. We also meet a nonprofit executive called Darren Walker, who tries to pitch ideas about systemic change and the limitations of philanthrocapitalism to the philanthrocapitalist set, although near the end of the book he is sadly suckered into a well-paid job on the board of Pepsi. One of the most interesting people we talk to is "thought leader" Amy Cuddy of "power pose" fame, who actually spent several decades as a serious sociological researcher of issues of workplace sexism before getting famous as the "power pose" lady, because — and this, really, is the core issue being highlighted here — you can get famous talking about individualized self-help life hacks like power poses, but you can't get famous doing real intellectual work about society's problems. 

The sections on thought leadership and the highly formulaic ways in which it deforms public discourse was, for me, the most interesting part of the book. Giridharadas also talks a bit about Dan Drezner's book on thought leadership, The Ideas Industry, which reminded me that I've also been meaning to read that for a while. The main trick of thought leadership is to present minor coping mechanisms as revolutionary solutions to social issues so that nobody has to do anything unpleasant like push for social change or, god forbid, identify anyone or anything as the bad guy. The result can end up being a bit victim-blamey, but that's OK, because we'll all just pretend it isn't. The only time under which it is acceptable to get mad at anyone is if that person has identified a problem that might have a win-lose solution rather than a win-win one; when that happens, there are no limitations to how smarmy you're allowed to be. Giridharadas also discusses "Pinkerization," which is the process by which Steven Pinker went from being a dude with the somewhat defensible thesis of "interpersonal violence as a means of problem-solving has, overall, fallen over the past several decades" (the normal, non-MarketWorld implication of which would probably just be like "So if you believe we should work to solve problems in ways other than interpersonal violence, know that you're not crazy and it is possible") to The World's Most Annoying Man. 

While the most interesting people Giridharadas talks to are the ones who are not hacks, the most illuminating book subjects are the ones that are. Perhaps because I read this book right after finishing Martin Harris' Poker and Pop Culture, on multiple occasions I found myself reminded of Worm, Edward Norton's character from Rounders — you know, the guy who gets Mike and himself into a big mess, and then every time Mike does something to get them out of it he "helps," derailing Mike's actions and making things worse. All anyone in or watching Rounders wants is for Worm to stop helping. Similarly, the 1% needs to stop thinking up fancy ways to pay less in taxes so it can "give back" the money it hoards in precisely the ways it wants to, and just stop fucking around for five goddamn minutes for once in their fucking life. 

The later parts of the book, once we're done doing Comm 101 on the thought leadership formula, gets more into the ways in which this particular method of world-changing is actively sinister, in addition to being a cheap facsimile of intellectualism: It's thoroughly undemocratic and paternalistic. Not only is it undemocratic within its own bounds, but it's significantly eroding democracy itself. Again, we meet some people who are resistant to the idea that there's anything wrong here at all; some people that think there's probably a problem generally but not with them or anything they do specifically; and some people who can see that there's something pretty wrong but who chicken out of doing anything about it because they just, for whatever reason, cannot bring themselves to go so far as actually being class traitors. All their fancy business school educations and top-down views of making change seem to have left them with a deep-seated learned helplessness at the idea of getting out into the democratic square and doing something collectively to build power there; even when they recognize that they should, they wrack their tiny warped Ivy League brains and cannot grasp out ideas like "do a canvassing shift for a politician who is promising to raise your taxes" or "find an actual grassroots organization working on something in your neighborhood and cover the cost of printing flyers for their events." Possibly the maddest I got reading this book (and this is saying something) was one guy whining that he'd leave activism to the activists because he didn't think he was good at it. My dude, if you weren't suffocating your brain of oxygen in the rareified air you inhabit you might learn that nobody shows up out of nowhere good at doing activism; everyone has something to contribute if you are willing to swallow your pride and do stuff that needs doing instead of just stuff that makes you feel like You Personally Are Saving The World. I bet all these guilt-ridden scions of wealth have printers in their fancypants offices that they could use in service of the cause, if nothing else. But that ain't flashy enough for them; they literally can't conceive of what engaging in collective action might look like if they can't swoop in and be Linda Sarsour on Day 1. (Any guilt-ridden scions of wealth reading this: Donate to the DSA Solidarity Fund! Don't join, though; it'll be good for you to refrain from having voting rights. Builds character.) 

 

Anyway, while I enjoyed myself a lot mentally translating the language in this book from liberalese into Angry Marxist, I think I would especially recommend it for people who are themselves left-leaning liberals but not Angry Marxists (yet). It's also obviously good to give to any bright young people who are being recruited by McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, if you run in those circles.