Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All is a very good book that serves up a lesson, one that — to me — is not manifest within the pages itself. The mission of the book is to explore the attitudes and behaviors of the elite and that term — elite — loses any nebulous qualities as Giridharadas goes to the source, interviewing heiresses and philanthropists who find personal turmoil in how their relationship to money affects the world. He talks to financiers in-training who are choosing to join the system while also trying to act on grave reservations they hold about that very same system. He highlights the Clinton Global Initiative’s (CGI) culpability in contributing to negative effects on the world and even interviews former President Clinton himself.
And that is the crux of Giridharadas’ argument, the point of the book — to unpack how things seemingly so integral to the functioning of the world are also — and more importantly so — negative. Now, let me say that discerning how the success of something like the CGI can be another person’s evil is a delicate matter. But Giridharadas succeeds, spotlighting how “marketworld” — the winners — have used their power to limit how government institutes social programs, instead taking on the task of social betterment themselves. And it has worked.
But perception of this status quo, while not the purview of the book — indeed, Giridharadas explicitly meets the elite on their own turf, gauging their attitudes — does not get discussed. The populace, the 99%, or better to say the middle class and everyone below, is a radically ineffectual blob intentionally (in my mind) advertised to by their betters: the message is a continuation and amplification of the Horatio Alger myth. The Americans who would benefit from a change that the elites will not make are not even capable of formulating an understanding of their situation.
“Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent” Wittgenstein said and I argue this is applicable in the context of politics as it relates to topics like the brotherhood of man and the global community: seeking justice on these fundamental economic issues is — again, to me — decisively rendered ineffectual based on the inertia of the — of our — system. The same error is made when talking of an ideal libertarian world where some fiscally conservative yet socially liberal regime somehow rules.
Libertarianism generally is connected with the right and on the left we have Communism, the inevitable outcome of an outgrowth of Capitalism, a system that will rule the future and justly dictates action today. Libertarianism likewise, based on an idealized view of its principles, argues its own importance in making decisions today.
Giridharadas presents an elite who’ve managed to squelch dissent and, though it is nonsensical, are the victims of their own success. Which means they are not victims — they have successfully done as Fredrick Gates, advising John D. Rockefeller, said to do: “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows”. Giridharadas provides this quote, a word of advice to the successful in an age when public resentment of the rich was being channeled into populist movements.
Today that word of advice is being heeded more than ever — where are the popular movements decry economic injustice? They are there, don’t get me wrong, but — sad and difficult to say — popular action is diverted into so-called social justice movements and not movements seeking economic justice. Done with the complicity of the media, the media an ally to the powerful for many reasons not least that they are owned by the powerful.
Is there hope? I think of Winston Smith’s thoughts from George Orwell’s 1984, words that have stuck with me since I first read the book in high school:
“ ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’
If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within."
That the impetus for meaningful change will not come from the winners is the between-the-lines message of Giridharadas’ book. Today the winners have taken all, the proles have been captured.
