Capitalist Ideology: “The Language of Capitalism”: Power of the Black Zero

Terms have always been used to make politics; they create realities and consolidate power structures. SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his Labor Minister Franz Müntefering spoke of “reform” when, shortly after the turn of the millennium, they embarked on a neoliberal course with Agenda 2010 and implemented the most drastic social cuts in German post-war history. They used a linguistic term that their social democratic party colleague Willy Brandt had once used in a completely different way: as a positive description for social and emancipatory change.

A decade later, the then CDU finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble referred to the “Swabian housewife”. With this phrase he wanted to legitimize his rigid austerity measures in the federal budget – and also his uncompromising stance in the European dispute over Greek state finances. Due to his propagated adherence to the debt brake, often referred to as the “black zero”, an enormous investment backlog arose in the following years in important areas of Germany’s public infrastructure, especially in the education system and the transport sector.

Daniel Baumann and Stefan Lever, two authors of the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, published a “Dictionary of Misleading” in 2016. In this they exposed political language that is often taken up uncritically by their colleagues in journalism. Phrases such as “personal initiative,” “socially disadvantaged,” “competitiveness,” or “cutting bureaucracy” were examples of words with a “sedating effect.” Once such a term has been established, according to Baumann and Hebel, it “from then on shapes our perception of the world – whether the interpretative framework itself is correct is then only rarely questioned.”

Rescue package and free mentality

The recently published book “The Language of Capitalism” follows on from these analyses. It was written by the Freiburg literary scholar Simon Sahner and the Frankfurt economist Daniel Stähr. The authors met through their work at the online magazine “54books”. The special appeal of this new publication lies in the cooperation between their two specialist disciplines. Because only a few economists question the language they use, which is usually characterized by a one-sided worldview. Conversely, feature writers are often not too interested in tangible economic connections.

What lies behind phrases like “rescue package”, “free mentality”, “openness to technology” or “sick man of Europe”? Why are banks or insurance companies in financial difficulties supposedly “too big to fail” and therefore have to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense? Does the “invisible hand of the market” even exist, which the father of today’s economics, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, wrote about in the 18th century? The radical market “Chicago Boys” around Milton Friedman took up his formulation. They first put their ideology into practice in the Chilean military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Only a short time later, Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the USA under Ronald Reagan followed this neoliberal course.

What does it mean when people talk about “earning” money or “owing” it to others? Are companies “employers” or doesn’t this description fit much more accurately to those who work there, who are incorrectly referred to as “employees”? Cremer and Stähr interpret these and other terms as “historically grown attributions of power,” depicted and manifested through language. As an antidote, they call for more reflection on the phrases that are often used carelessly in everyday life. This is the only way to free yourself from an “apparent capitalist lack of alternatives”.

Genius with state aid

The book begins with the effective (self-)narration of the successful entrepreneurial genius, vividly represented by Steve Jobs. The Apple boss, who died early, liked to look back on his personal biography during his product presentations in a black turtleneck sweater. He openly described on stage that he had dropped out of his studies and made his living by collecting deposit bottles before founding the company. In his appearances, Jobs specifically cultivated the myth of the American dream, which allowed him to rise from rags to billionaire. An important element of such stories is always the claim that you have made it to the top on your own, without any social benefits or other financial support from outside.

Most of these narratives, according to Sahner and Stähr, are “incomplete and hide something crucial; many are simply wrong.” The technological history of the devices developed by Apple – and especially the smartphone – clearly shows how much the company has benefited from massive government investments in basic research (originally mostly military-motivated) in the United States. Just because Steve Jobs doesn’t mention this fact, he can present himself as a seemingly independent self-made man – and thus perfectly serves a neoliberal cliché.

The authors plead for more linguistic precision; they want to investigate the “patterns and traces that capitalism has produced and that at the same time support it.” The way in which people talk about the economic system obscures how economic processes work, makes options for action invisible and thereby consolidates existing conditions. The result is that “we misjudge our own role in this system.” As an example, “concise and easy to understand,” Sahner and Stähr explain the linguistic approach to the topic of inflation: Do prices simply rise by themselves? Or is it not more the case that they are deliberately increased by the sellers of the products? What always remains invisible is that “someone is responsible,” and that there are “people who benefit from it.”

Base and superstructure

The criticized terms and narratives, the authors emphasize, are not always used consciously. And they are by no means part of a perfidious conspiracy, specifically planned by a secret power to deceive the unsuspecting: “We do not assume that all people who communicate in these patterns want to keep consumers ignorant.” Rather, “we all tell them Stories of capitalism and sometimes don’t even notice it.”

Unmasking linguistic obfuscations is a special challenge, and “none of us could tackle it without the other,” is how Cremer and Stähr sum up their “perhaps unusual collaboration” between a cultural scientist and an economist. Both disciplines alone would “only overcome some of the difficulties.” Humanities scholars attempt to explain “how metaphors work, why they are useful in interpersonal communication, and what rhetorical tasks they fulfill.” But in addition, an understanding of socio-economic relationships is also essential. It is precisely in this unusual combination that the strength of the book lies.

Simon Sahner/Daniel Stähr: The language of capitalism. S. Fischer 2024, 300 pages, hardcover, €24.