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a week ago I They told of a journalist that when he stays to go have a coffee with someone, he calculates in advance if the meeting will leave him with any economic benefit and if not, he cancels. It took effort for me to try to get into the head of someone for whom every second of his day must be translated into money. As far as my imagination could go was that this journalist saw himself as a business and his life as accounting. A soldier of calculation. I stopped when I started trying to imagine his love life.
It was Max Weber who observed that militarization was not about using soldiers, but about organizing a society based on the orders, hierarchies, and disciplines of an army. Militarization is vigilance, as in Franco’s dictatorship in Spain or Pinochet’s in Chile, that no more than three people gather in public
. In Bismarck’s Germany at the end of the 19th century, Weber studied how factories, bureaucratic offices, schools, and stories of personal life were transformed into the rationality of strategy, tactics, campaign, win or die. In fact, he warned that, as part of this militarization of daily life, civil society was not aware that he thought like a soldier. The term efficient
it comes from armies and came to mean something positive for companies and governments: rationalized time, the speed at which it is produced, the result over the means used to achieve it, the immediacy of what it means to be winner
either loser
. The week as battle. Life as war.
It does not seem risky to suppose that this cage
weberiana went from the army to the companies and found its final shelter in the individual mind, which lives submerged in the fiction of being entrepreneur
, that is, that his whole life is a business. If we look around us, the idea of the business owner, as a general of an army that is his company, no longer exists: the transition to shareholders and investment funds made money flows and their decisions anonymous and almost indifferent to the consequences for their workers and the environment. The very idea of utility has suffered in favor of the more attractive rise in the value of shares. Thus, you can have companies that, without producing profits, generate shares through the skies. That was the case with the oil exploration contracts during the Peñanietismo that got rich without getting a single drop of fuel. But, curiously, what causes the disappearance of companies as we knew them in the last century, is their consolidation, more like fiction than reality, in personal life.
There is a documentary that exemplifies for me the tragedy of life as a business. Is named Lula Rich and tells the story of some housewives who sell leggings. They passionately believe in the illusion that their efforts and savings can emulate their sportswear supplier, the Stidham couple from California who, like all tricksters, have a life story of aspirations: they say how their business started in the trunk of a car, and within a few years, they had a business worth nearly $2 billion. Of course, the drama of housewives is getting into debt and even losing their mortgaged houses, to try to meet the requirements of a pyramid scheme in which, except for those at the top, no one can win, only lose. This is because pyramid schemes are not about selling more, but about recruiting more. Thus, in the case of leggings, 0.01 percent of those at the top earned $130,000 a month while the rest lost money. The scam had the contents of our business modernity: family businesses, use of Instagram to sell, imposing a trend of wearing sportswear in offices, a vain speech feminist
of empowerment through job exhaustion and even the idea of gastric surgeries in Tijuana to have a better body image. In the end, the scam that has 90,000 vendors ends up resembling an army or a religious sect: orders come down and must be carried out without accepting interpretations or dissent.
There is no reason to avoid thinking about the life that was proposed to us from neoliberalism with the example of 0.01 percent of its beneficiaries. As the rest of the vendors who failed to achieve their results were ordered, it was all about putting in more effort, more hours of work, more investment, and the rest would come one day, the day of the economic spill
. The idea of postponing satisfaction was not for the higher-ups, the Stidhams and their henchmen, who threw massive parties where Katy Perry sang and gave exploited housewives a taste of the abundance they could never afford. to access. And, as in almost all cases of extreme exploitation of the family business idea, the leggings, LuLaRoe, did not close or was punished by justice. There it goes. But what amazes me is that it not only existed because of the unbridled ambition and lack of scruples of its creators, but because there were nearly 100,000 white, suburban women in the United States who believed in a life suddenly enchanted by the idea of profit. and the value of themselves as something that can fit on a spreadsheet.
