In the Film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden addresses the assembled members of the fight club, thusly:
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
I am starting to look at my next topic in the manner of the beginning of Fight Club. The movie is one long flash-back, leaping backwards from the penultimate scene in the high rise windows. In the continuing saga of movie education for my giant Kid, we watched Fight Club last night. Once again, I watched the twin themes of the disease of consumerism, the 'Ikea Nesting" virus, and the masculine poverty of generations of men raised by women, intertwine and stagger to a cathartic end.
So, we begin at the present for the briefest of moments. Are corporations, lost in their own greed and insular culture, eating themselves from the inside? Cracks open in the gleaming chrome facades of the corporate culture as giant but inoffensive modernist sculptures are trucked away from recently locked doors at the headquarters of failed behemoths of business. Washington Mutual Bank, Enron, Lehman Brothers and General Motors are just a few of the houses of cards that have tumbled recently. Is the structure of Capitalism rotting from within?
As I turn this over in my head I keep coming up with distinct corporate "eras" for lack of a better term. While the periods of time I am going to list could be broken down many ways or subdivided ever smaller, compartmentalizing some of the last fifty years is helping me to develop a different perspective on capitalism as I experience it today.
Mark's most certainly flawed list of the epochs of modern Capitalism goes like this:
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
2) Corporations deploy Madison Avenue -- While advertising was certainly a force prior to the the early1960's, this, to me is the beginning of the paradigm shift from selling a product to selling a life-style that requires a product to be complete
3) Omnipotence -- During the 1960's and 1970's corporations become more and more monolithic and omnipotent, the guiding hand behind the scenes. Howard Beale rants and rails against the modern corporation in the 1976 film "Network" and is killed for his trouble. The nightmare vision of of a world controlled by a cabal of corporations rather than individual governments comes to the fore.
4) Interior Decay -- Somewhere along the way, US Corporations stop building products and the US economy shifts to a service economy. Manufacturing jobs begin to disappear and Wall Street becomes a place where money is moved for the sake of moving money in ever increasing spirals of greed. This is our time.
Looking back at each of these periods is going to be the current work. While the US credit rating falters and talking head pundits scream at each other, I think that my time will be better spent trying to understand the context. Could the work of the self-grasping and greedy corporate and Wall Street magnates bring down that which all of the demonstrations and boycotts of the last forty years could not? Stay tuned.
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