Business as salvation

The world of business has become cosmos, says Jeremy Seabrook.

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THE dominance of 'business' over all other human activities is now established. It has become both cult and path of salvation. Business studies are now a major focus of pedagogy; business-parks invite the playful investor; the business environment determines the supreme ecology, which is that of profit. The world of business has become cosmos.

Business is another country, with its own dialect and its own culture. Business news dominates the media, while experts from financial institutions, investment houses and banks are regularly invited to express their views in the press and on TV, not only on financial affairs, but also on the principal social and moral questions of the age. You don't have to be an enemy of enterprise to see that uncritical adulation of business is in danger of submerging all other purposes, and that the task it is called on to perform is quasi-religious, nothing less than the redemption of humanity. To be 'anti-business' is now equivalent to a belief in witchcraft.   

The upholders of a fictive 'real world', slashers of deficits and devotees of the bottom line, preachers of cost-effectiveness and of that tenacious tautology, value for money, are now in undisputed command of the world. It is only to be expected that public service, duty and altruism should fall into profitless abeyance, since there is 'no market' for such archaic qualities, especially at a time of stringency, austerity, even misted over by the crocodile tears of those who wish it were not so, but who find it hard to conceal their exultation in the straitened circumstances and the prospect of a new era of public squalor. Only the gods of wealth remain untouched, as they go about their unaccountable avocations, celestial gambling in the gaming-houses of capital, out-of-this-world dealings in the sacred mysteries of wealth creationism, administering themselves lavish rewards for small talent.

As for the impenetrable labyrinth of bailouts, sovereign debts, rescue-packages, insomniac negotiations in the eurozone that go down to the wire, the gyrations of markets - this is the politics of appeasement, not now of demented dictators, but of a totalising system run amok, the untameable power of markets, against which humanity seeks shelter in vain. As long as books and trade are balanced and the economy re-balanced, it does not matter what other losses of equilibrium may occur.

The ideology of universal business imposes upon everyone the duty to become entrepreneurs, micro-managers, administrators of small businesses; with the result that those who have nothing to sell are pariahs or parasites. 'Business' - a domesticated version of capitalism - has filled the vacuum left by the death of socialism. Commerce, uncontainable, is everywhere bursting its taxpayer-rescued banks and flooding spaces which had formerly been fortified against its resistless spillage. The limits which demarcate humanity from business have been breached, and few can say where one ceases and the other starts: are debt-traps, the toils of poverty, windfalls, credit-droughts and mortgage famines, the rhythms of money, with their arbitrary harvests and undependable seasons, simply an aspect of the natural world or are they reflections of the business cycle? Or are these now the same thing? 

Business has invaded areas of experience in which, in a less enlightened time, it might have been thought to have no place. We cannot wait to recast whatever activity we pursue in the image of business, since only those whose business is business are entitled to see themselves as full and true citizens; everyone else is pensioner or dependant. Our very lives demand a business plan. It is our duty, as human products, to 'market ourselves', to re-brand and burnish our image, to top-up our skills and maintain up-to-date biodata, to 're-tool' ourselves for the expertise demanded by a future whose shape no one can foresee. Indeed, economic forecasters prove to be no more reliable predictors of the future than meteorologists: they are constantly downgrading their growth forecasts, or failing to factor in some obvious feature of the time, overtaken by events that scarcely figure in their stern version of reality.

There is nowhere to rest from this compulsion, the economic miracle that demands that the sick rise from their beds and take up gainful activity, that those with disability seek employment through the healing ministry of business, that the vulnerable and despairing offer their meagre labour to the restorative that is the enterprise of others.

That the expanding universe of commerce is no mere metaphor may be read into the way in which human relationships are increasingly expressed in terms of performance-related business transactions. Our emotional attachments are regarded as good or risky investments: will they pay dividends? What returns can we expect for friendship, devotion or love? Has our commitment become unprofitable? Are our affections unrewarded? This is the era of the pay-out, the pay-back and the pay-off, in the realm of feelings no less than in the social interactions; while no level of human desolation or need is not somebody else's business opportunity. And although ritual obeisance is paid to the six million unpaid carers of those they love, caring, compassion and concern now provide rich pickings for the pioneers of universal business.

All societies are liable to bouts of ideological madness, not least those which pride themselves on their rationality and pragmatism. We animate our version of progress or development with anthropomorphic qualities, speaking reverentially about the health of business, injections of cash, radical economic surgery, the regenerative power of business, its recovery; and we eagerly await the next quarter's - or next month's - statistics much as allegedly primitive societies examined the entrails of sacrificial animals for a clue to the conduct they should follow. We tiptoe around markets as though in the presence of some capricious deity, calming their nervousness, volatility, their jitters or hesitancies. Every day is a day of judgment by the agencies by whose secular, but oddly numinous, grace we survive. David Cameron talks of earning 'market credibility', as inscribed in the holy ledgers of the recording angels of credit-rating agencies. 

Perhaps the time will come when we look back in wonder at our own credulity, the superstitions of our apparent common sense. Awakenings always follow the raising of aberrant beliefs into orthodoxies. When these are discarded, the apparently good reasons which made them appear inevitable become an object of shame and their abandonment evidence of progress - slavery, child labour, the subjection of women, imperialism, racism; and we look back with revulsion on the broken shrines at which we lately worshipped.

What happens when the business model ceases to function, when the lease runs out on the frail tenement that is our life? How shall we then wind up our affairs? Faced with the bankruptcy of time and the collapse of our bottom line, with what sternness or leniency will the impassive assessors of eternity liquidate our wasted  assets  and  blighted  properties?                                                        

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 271/272, Mar/Apr 2013, pp 66-67