You know who really matters in all the regular controversies that Nike stirs up around its sneakers.  (Its advertising and marketing division has been perfecting these tactics since the 1970s.) The Asian women who work in the factories making these shoes. They are the living laboring women often making seventy to ninety cents an hour and cranking out shoes that sell for hundreds of dollars.

Their labor and the sneakers reveal how capitalist enterprises are not about profit. Profit is not enough. Profit is not the point. Capitalist enterprises are about extracting value for the elites of the system. These elites of capitalism are transnational—meaning not only that they are global but also that they and their capital, their cash and assets, move across borders on a regular basis without much limitation.

Mark Parker is one of these transnational elites. After being promoted to CEO of Nike in 2016, Parker’s compensation tripled to over $47.6 million. $33.5 million of that compensation package came from stock rewards. His goal is to boost Nike sales from $32 billion in 2018 to $50 billion by 2020. This goal drives all of Nike’s tactics.

Colin Kaepernick is also a transnational elite. Not at the level of Parker, of course. But he, along with the capital from his endorsement deals and his investment portfolio, travel the globe as necessary, without dealing with border patrols or fences. In 2016, Newsweek estimated Kaepernick’s worth at $22 million.

The Asian women workers are not transnational elites. They cannot travel. They are rooted by their status, class, and gender—locked into coercive labor making Nike sneakers.

Parker coordinates the Nike staff of designers, marketers, and publicists to sell sneakers not for profit but for maximum extractive value. They hire Kaepernick to sell sneakers, not for any other reason.

And Kaepernick gets managers and stylists who coordinate his contract and publicity. He has a team of attorneys to sue the NFL for unfair labor practices in relation to his charge that owners blocked his potential for contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. In the mean time, he has a multi-million dollar deal with Nike publicity.

I am not saying Kaepernick does not have his own substantive political ideology regarding race and violence in the U.S., and I am aware of his philanthropy. My point is to set him and the debates about $200-500 sneakers into a larger economic context. My point is his position in the capitalist enterprise, which often gets ignored in our consumer capitalist, brand obsessed society.

The women cannot even organize as workers without severe consequences. They have no minimum wage laws. They do not have resources for stylists and attorneys. They cannot just sell houses and move to others. As these women workers get called into the factories of China and Vietnam to make more shoes for a few dollars a day while people debate sneaker design, I want to focus on the trail of capital value. Who gets the capital and the power?

Kaepernick is one of the beneficiaries, a transnational elite via his citizenship, geography, gender, and status. It does not make the critiques of his political ideology regarding race in the U.S. any more or less legitimate–but it does raise intense questions about why and how he and the rest of us use consumerism to address such serious politics and histories. Maybe overpriced sneakers made by exploited women are not the answer.

The post Asian Women Make Nike Sneakers first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.

The dismantling of neoliberalism could create a bridge between workers, writers, labor and justice activists, environmentalists, and scholars. The efforts could lead to new lobbying groups and policy proposals just as the dismantling of the New Deal and Great Society spawned neoliberalism. Two problems stand in the way: the word “liberal” appears and pushes many Americans into a knee-jerk rage, and even experts have not defined the ideology.

So, many working people express frustration and anxieties about the current economy. Scholars and experts with similar concerns critique neoliberalism. And we need a bridge between these two conversations.

In August 2017, Nathan Heller of the New Yorker called neoliberalism “a fashionable bugaboo.” But neoliberalism is not a made-up fear. It is a recognizable and persistent set of practices from the past 35 years whether we call it by that name or not. Anyone interested in economic equity must translate neoliberalism into a vernacular and pull apart the knot of economic exploitation swirled with inspirational rhetoric.

In America, we have to address the word “liberal.” When I teach twentieth-century history, at some point I bring in “liberalism.” I know the intricate scholarly debates about what I outline here in accessible strokes. But I want to keep it smart and plain.

Imagine the words liberal, classical liberalism, regulatory liberalism, and neoliberalism on a whiteboard. I put a red X through “liberal” because we are not using the American pop media meaning. Since the 1970s, the word has become tied to ideas of generic leftists, the Democratic Party, and certain political-social groups like civil rights, tree-huggers, and feminists—easier if we remove it.

Let’s keep it simple and agree “liberalism” is a philosophy of the late 1800s that emphasized individual rights, individual votes, individual contracts, deeded property rights, capitalism, market mechanisms, and commercial trade as the correct way to organize society. Many indigenous, nomadic, and communal societies did not organize this way.

Socialists, communists, fascists, and others did not support liberalism. When they pushed hard against it during the massive depression of the 1920s-1930s, the U.S. government under President Franklin Roosevelt proposed innovative policies that became “regulatory liberalism,” with increased government interventions in capitalism and its markets (also New Deal liberalism, embedded liberalism).

Its approach, which some complained went way too far, was often contrasted to good-ole “classical liberalism.” But a return to that was not acceptable to some U.S. and European men—major corporate families like the DuPonts, conservative economists, and finance executives. Shrinking 50 years of complex history into a summary: they began meeting in the late 1930s to replace regulatory liberalism and articulated an extreme ideology called “neoliberalism.” In the 1980s, neoliberal politicians and economists came to dominate U.S. and British governments.

This is neoliberal ideology: the individual and the market are the moral and most productive centers of rights and responsibilities. Therefore, all political and economic policies should get out of the way of “the individual” and “the market” and maximize conditions for their “free” operation. In idealistic form, the individual is a neutral person, free to make limitless choices in the market.

Neoliberalism has profound emotional appeal because it’s basically the inspirational hero narrative, beloved in American culture, set in economic terms.

In practice, neoliberalism appears as deregulation, austerity, privatization, “free trade,” and “flexible” employment. Any collective public efforts on behalf of workers, consumers, or shared natural resources as a whole are not welcome.

There are irreconcilable contradictions, like the market does not exist as a natural force, like gravity. The market is people making government policies, laws, rates, agreements, and prices mixed with human behaviors often driven by envy, fear, and prejudice. And workers seem to bear the “risks and rewards” of an “efficient economy” driven “purely by the market,” but investment bankers only bear the rewards because in losses they are protected as a group by layers of complicated financial products.

The utopian neoliberal ideology also ignores basic historic conditions: ethnic, religious, and racial bigotry; patriarchal arrangements; discriminatory practices like nepotism and cronyism; unflagging corruption; centuries of wealth accumulation by certain groups; colonialism; the advantage of legacies like affluent relatives who attended prestigious universities, secret societies, private clubs, and fundraisers.

So the results of actual neoliberal economics include a perpetual distribution of both income and wealth upward to the elite via regressive income taxes, cuts to capital gains and other wealth taxes, deregulation of investment banking, the dismantling of protections for worker organizing, a disinterest in innovative labor policies to address expanding contingent employment (from Uber and Starbucks to adjunct professors and freelance IT professionals), and the “opening of developing countries” to foreign investment. Neoliberalism in practice has had no proven results in improving conditions for working people or stabilizing the middle class.

Yet neoliberalism has dominated since 1980. Its utopian ideology, infused with the hero narrative, has buoyed its practices despite the clear losses and instability they generate for most working people. Permeated with upbeat cultural lines, neoliberal policies appeal because advocates use words like individual, liberty, choice, freedom, efficiency, and entrepreneur. Sounds fantastic! But the enchanting cultural lines obscure plain-old, predictable exploitation. It’s not a conspiratorial trick. Notions of the individual, choice, and freedom have always been part of American society. They then fused with and helped to foster neoliberalism in practice.

I suggest a healthy skepticism, questions like freedom for who, choice of what, efficiency for what benefit, flexibility for what purpose, and what percentage of Americans become millionaire entrepreneurs? Talking heads that critique “Wall Street” do little to puncture the neoliberal cultural lines. Who doesn’t love the idea of a plucky hero working his or her way to glorious financial success? We have to pull out the neoliberal cultural lines to get at the economic and political parts and start a shared conversation between frustrated working people, activists, and scholarly critics of neoliberalism.

The post Getting to Know Neoliberalism first appeared on Aimee Loiselle.