By James Richard Marra
In the United States, capitalism is becoming "mindful." Meditating corporate CEOs, capitalist think tanks, research institutions, and government ally to champion a burgeoning “mindfulness” industry and a new social conception of what it means to live and work under finance-monopoly capitalism (FMC). Increasingly, large domestic and globalized businesses, mainly in the finance, technology, and electronics (FTE) sector of the “Knowledge Economy” (KE) are introducing employer-sponsored employee meditation programs (EMPs). These programs work in synergy with putatively healthful and productive work environments, and within the wider social context of an emerging “socially conscious” capitalist regime.[1]
The business plans of individual enterprises as well of the EMP industry extend beyond the microeconomic to the entire FTE sector and the FMC society as a whole. The institutional network within the capitalist social “superstructure” supports these efforts, and thereby the profitability of businesses, markets, and the mindfulness industry. For example, innovative technology developed within universities fosters start-ups that establish deep penetration into related markets. Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman indicate that
This trend repeats itself on a global scale, as the founding of new firms occurs in a limited number of regions with access to leading research institutions, venture capital, and an abundant pool of educated labor (Owen-Smith et al. 2002).[2]
Combined, these institutions help businesses most profitably implement EMPs. They also help identify specific and favored sets of cognitive skills that can be used as metrics for recruiting, maintaining, and advancing the most valuable group of workers. These laborers represent the “hard core” of FTE labor power, whose technical prowess commands capitalist interest.
Yet, these workers endure increasingly afflictive work environments created by the modes of production FTE businesses. These businesses need to respond to competition resulting from the rapid introduction of new products, and technological innovation; so work is “fast paced.” Profitability demands feed heavy productivity goals, translating into workers working harder, and over longer periods. They do so while accepting increasing responsibilities driven by workforce consolidations and reductions, and “flexible” working hours. Peter S. Goodman, Executive Business and Global News Editor at The Huffington Post, points out that flexible work hours create an environment where, "No one counts how many hours people sit at their desks." At Google, some workers endure 80-hour workweeks.[3] At Amazon, “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”[4]
Productive work within the FTE is intense, its volume considerable, involving complex technical tasks and management processes. Research correlates persistent physical, psychological, and social problems among workers laboring within such debilitating workplace environments. These conditions create psychological and behavioral dispositions that negatively affect productivity. Workers exhibit a lack of empathy, impatience, emotional control, and task engagement, as well as a commitment to business goals and loyalty to the employer. Low worker morale can lead to behaviors that weaken collaboration, communication, leadership, creativity, accountability, and judgment. They can also increase absenteeism, employee turnover, while corrupting business and ethical judgments. The federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “productivity losses related to personal and family health problems cost U.S. employers $1,685 per employee per year, or $225.8 billion annually.”
Consider as an example of this systemic workplace toxicity, the wage system under which many millennials work. FTE workers receive wages and benefits, Marx's "variable capital" payments. Because EMPs are an investment in employee skills and wellness, and not in the means of production, business owners pay for EMPs, applying capital, and accounting it to some benefit (like “wellness”) or wage category (like a bonus). The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes wage structure rules. The US Labor Department Most considers most FTE workers as “exempt” from overtime wages. These include executive management, administrators, professional, and computer roles.
The FLSA salary protocol provides businesses with a profitable mechanism by which owners can allow workers to meditate during the working day, without incurring a potential business risk involving overtime payments. Workers can meditate at work all they wish, as long as they meet production requirements, and manifest corresponding workforce performance dispositions. With exempt compensation, the functional significance of the length of the working day as a determinant of productivity is lost. The concept of the “working day” is replaced by the “contract period,” and removed from the capitalist lexicon of exempt labor.
The result is that the range of practicable solutions to the debilitating effects of expanding working days is constrained. For example, the range of potential improvements to the workplace environment identified by Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum include only those that require a modification of employee behavior, and not other aspects of the mode of production, such as the length of the working day. Nowhere in the paper do the authors mention such concepts as "the working day," "exempt," "salaried," or "hourly." They employ the word "capital" exclusively with reference to human capital management: "Our senior management is committed to health promotion as an important investment in human capital.”[5] When identifying changes to the working environment, the study offers strategies that "range from changes to the working environment, such as providing healthy food options in the cafeteria, to comprehensive interventions that support employees in adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyles."[6]
Nevertheless, businesses remain sensitive to the negative production implications of worker debilitation. They are also aware of the human capital value of offering a mindfulness program as part of their wellness and self-fulfillment benefits. Thus, employers address a potential production problem, while also providing value added to the employee. The millennial workforce appreciates of value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. These meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness.
Denise Parris is recognizes the need to align millennial socialization with the current mode of production. Her work ethic recognizes that “helping others is not self-sacrifice but self-fulfillment,”[7] and seeks to impress upon business owners an appreciation of the productive value of servant leadership, and motivate them to implement EMPs. In this way, industry experts advise businesses on how to leverage the socialization of a favored class of workers to design and promote their EMPs, which promise expanded productivity.[8]
The metaphysics, theory, science, ethos, promises, and expectations surrounding EMPs have their critics. William Little, writing for The Guardian, criticizes selective causality and evidentiary cherry picking within EMP marketing. He suggests, echoing Marx and Engels, that workplace meditation may represent an “opiate” that desensitizes the worker from the symptoms of the toxic workplace.[9]
Some scientific studies regarding EMPs suggest prudence regarding claims of positive affects of workplace meditation. As M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga conclude from a study of 41 meditation programs that “the mantra meditation programs do not appear to improve any of the psychological stress and well-being outcomes we examined, but the strength of this evidence varies from low to insufficient.[10] Behavioral scientists Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, writing for the The New York Times, illuminate a puzzling contradiction:
“A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.”[11]
Critics point to the preliminary and inconclusive evidence that some workplace meditation advocates claim corroborates the effectiveness of mindfulness in achieving favored cognitive skills.[12]
Kim reports that, “Mindfulness training can also run counter to a corporation’s goals. An article published by the journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2015 suggests that because mindfulness encourages employees to act in line with their values and interests, it may elicit behaviors that are not in the best interests of organizational performance.”[13] A 2017 report from the National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health suggests that the fine-tuning of meditative practices accomplished within EMPs may contribute little to their success. Researchers analyzing the prevalence and patterns of use of three meditation types concluded that the "use of meditation may be more about the type of person practicing than about the specific type of meditation practiced...."[14]
Some studies indicate that meditation might not be as effective as previously expected. While some FTE workers enjoy their work and workplaces, many who are offered EMPs view their work as nothing more self-actualizing than a paycheck. These workers experience little, if any, enjoyment or self-fulfillment in their productivity. Since the technology they employ in production is the business owner's private property, workers experience a lack of control over their work, and view their labor as simply a meaningless job. The resulting weakening of labor power contributes to an existential "torment" among workers; what Marx calls “alienation.”
The potential that workers might shift from applying their meditation to practical wellness and cognitive skills enhancement to deeper philosophical insight is reflected in an analysis by Robert Wright, author of the book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.[15]
Nonetheless, the average mindfulness meditator is closer to the ancient contemplative tradition, and to transformative insights, than you might think. Though things like stress reduction or grappling with melancholy or remorse or self-loathing may seem “therapeutic,” they are organically connected to the very roots of Buddhist philosophy. What starts out as a meditation practice with modest aims can easily, and very naturally, go deeper. There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration and radical philosophical reorientation, and many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.[16]
If Robert Wright is correct, then Raytheon is at risk of creating worker disillusionment if their meditation brings them to moral realizations that are at odds with corporate profit.[17]
As we have seen, there are implications within the capitalist global superstructure as well. Writing for The Guardian, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, an international security journalist and academic, suggest an artful side to the altruistic pronouncements of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism (CIC). Reporting on the Henry Jackson Society's 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, which inspired the EPIC report, Ahmed summarizes the purpose of the event.
While the self-reflective recognition by global capitalism's leaders that business-as-usual cannot continue is welcome, sadly the event represented less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.[18]
EMPs may carry significant inductive business risks. If EMPs fail to deliver, the wasted capital investment in training results from a misunderstanding of the available evidence and the causality of workplace meditation. Business owners multiply this risk when they take biased explanations of workplace toxicity seriously (like that of Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum). However, even where EMPs fail, businesses can still ameliorate inductive business risk. This is because EMPs can still function to identify, hire, and retain (through the use of a wellness performance metrics) those workers who possess valued natural cognitive abilities; and thus bolster a company's the inclusive branding that can increase its market share.
Rebecca Stoner appreciates an impact upon worker socialization. Stoner reviews Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism by John Patrick Leary,[19] a book critical of the capitalist semantic project, and offers a Marxist interpretation of Leary's account. Capitalist keywords (including some of those cited in this study) represent “a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that...promulgate values friendly to corporations...over those friendly to human beings....When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we’re seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we’re implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence.[20] [My italics]
This threat is proudly announced within the reconstructed semantic of inclusive capitalism.
...[T]here’s the “moral vocabulary of late capitalism,” which often uses words with older, religious meanings; Leary cites a nineteenth-century poem that refers to Jesus as a “thought leader.” These moral values, Leary says, are generally taken to be indistinguishable from economic ones. “Passion,” for example, is prized for its value to your boss: if you love what you do, you’ll work harder and demand less compensation.[21]
Replacing “Jesus” the Song of God with Jesus the thought “leader” defines away (or “rationalizes”) much of the hard-core metaphysical and ethical orientations that underpin traditional meditation practice. This provides businesses with a new ethical use value aligned with a millennial socialization that is at least disillusioned with traditional religion. Businesses then offer this use value, an ethical ethos, to workers, directing it towards cajoling workers, and then controlling their ethical and productive dispositions in a way that keeps them working at maximum capacity.
I use the word “rationalize” in order to highlight Weber’s analysis of the process of rationalization that he claims removed the Protestant ethic from the economic and social aspects of an emerging capitalism. Work conceived as a spiritual calling evolves into labor as a function of profit.
At present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions, with the forms of organization and general structure which are particular to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, purely as a result of adaptation. The capitalistic system so needs this devotion to the calling of making money, it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can to-day no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life with any single Weltanschauung. In fact, it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to influence economic life...to be as much an unjustified interference as its regulation by the State. In such circumstances men’s commercial and social interests do tend to determine their opinions and attitudes.[22]
Similarly, EMPs significantly circumscribe the meditation training offered to workers in ways that not only maximize their effect within an encompassing system of capitalist production, but also appeal to a secular millennial worldview. EMP meditation practice does not center on expanding the spirituality of workers in order avoid business risks associated with realizations emerging from deeper insight meditation. Rather, it aims to calm and focus the mind, a goal that aligns with the millennial wellness and self-fulfillment ethos. It also reflects the millennial appreciation of the value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. Meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness. For many workers, EMPs provide appreciated healthful use values.
It is not surprising that the EMP industry deconstructs the traditional ethical, religious, and semantic orientation of meditation, re-conceptualizing it as a productive and self-actualizing mindfulness ethos. By doing do, capitalism can gradually transform (through social engineering and scientific management technology, for example) the external social semantic of its preferred workforce into one whose ethical hard core is aligned with inclusive capitalism. Thus, capitalism appropriates the externality represented by the consciousnesses of workers, including their natural cognitive abilities and dispositions and language, for the purposes of increasing labor power, and to rebrand itself as inclusive, and therefore potentially profitable. Together, these synergies represent the systemic tendency of capitalism to expand into new resource and market externalities, unexploited or underexploited. EMPs intend to assist productive and organizational requirements by exploiting one such externality: the cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions of skilled workers. By doing so, EMPs promulgate a reconstructed and inclusive mindfulness ethos for workers that businesses employ internally to maintain its productive system, and expand their sales.
The synergizing of productive capabilities along with branding and marketing efforts manifests an interpenetration of production and sales that typifies FMC.[23] Thus, the mindfulness industry exploits both the millennial worker desire for self-actualization (“success”) and the need of capitalism to accumulate to aligning a program of worker socialization with new technical modes of production, while simultaneously advancing business-marketing efforts.
This ethos is institutionalized in the operational semantics and metrics developed by the CIC, a marketing metrics that measures and advertises “intangible” capital. For example, significant intangible capital consists in a highly motivated workforce keen on developing individualized worker professional development plans. Since employers value self-motivation directed toward the advancement of productive skills, EMPs, beyond the directly productive, help businesses identify and retain workers with that favored workplace behavioral disposition. They do this by helping human capital management develop performance metrics for individual workers that are used to identify this favored workplace behavior, and provide a basis for appropriate compensation and potential advancement.
As FTE businesses realize the potential risks engendered within a toxic workplace, the mindfulness industry predictably blossoms. Meditation rooms, beautifully landscaped outdoor walking paths, and yoga training become as common as data models, spreadsheets, and project plans. If metrics indicate that meditation is “successful” in the sense explained by the CIC, companies can communicate their capacity for profitability to customers and investors with reference to specialized “human value levers” (like “Occupational health and wellbeing” - including meditation).
More evidence is required to verify the “successes” of EMPs. Certainly, people of good conscience wish others well, and hope that meditation practice will continue to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Even if EMPs do not deliver spiritually or behaviorally, businesses can engineer their programs to work synergistically with human capital management to enhance productivity. Businesses do this through worker acquisition and retention efforts that appeal to valued workers through offering EMPs. They also promote sales and investment by using value levers as advised by the inclusive business consortiums. Through the application of ergonomics, operational innovation, and advanced scientific management technology, capitalists can accomplish this without altering their empowering class apparatus of capitalism, and potentially maintain maximized accumulation.
To its credit, capital remains resilient and adaptive in its rebranding efforts, and for good business reasons. Nevertheless, as Ahmed reminds us, consortiums like the CIC might remain an “event” representing “less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.”
Notes
[1] The terms “socially conscious” and “inclusive” are used synonymously within the theory, practice, and marketing of the new capitalist social consciousness. This study will use “inclusive,” as used by supporters participating in the “Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism,” which is examined below.
[2] Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman, “The Knowledge Economy,” Annual Review of
Sociology 30 (2004): 17.
[3] Peter S. Goodman, "Why Companies Are Turning To Meditation And Yoga To Boost The Bottom Line," Huffpost, April 1, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/mindfulness-capitalism_n_3572952.html. (accessed February 11, 2019).
[4] Michael Sainato, “’We are not Robots’: Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize,” The Guardian, January 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/01/amazon-fulfillment-center-warehouse-employees-union-new-york-minnesota. (accessed April 27, 2019).
[5] Soeren Mattke, Christopher Schnyer, and Kristin R. Van Busum 30.
[6] Ibid., 3.
[7] "Denise Parrish," Price College of Business, http://www.ou.edu/price/entecdev/people/denise-parris. (accessed April 17, 2019).
[8] In this latter regard, Peter Temin’s hypothesis regarding the rise of a global “Dual Economy” as a manifestation of the emergence of the FTE sector provides a rich source of theoretical and empirical considerations regarding evolving and emerging sub-class distinctions within the working class.
[9] William Little, “Mindfulness courses at work? This should have us all in a rage,” The Guardian, Jan 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/
mindfulness-work-employers-meditation. (accessed February 25, 2019). Powell and Snellman: “Are these new practices intended to remake the organization of work to produce shared gains, or to increase productivity by increasing work output while the associated gains are skimmed off by those at the top of the (flatter) hierarchy?” (op. cit. 210)
[10] M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga, "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-Being," Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, 124, January 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK180104/#discussion.s9. (accessed April 7, 2019).
[11] Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, “Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate,” The New York Times, June 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/
2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html. (accessed November 3, 2018).
[12] Pandit Dasa and David Brendel, “Does Mindfulness Training Have Business Benefits?”
[13] Hannah H, Kim, “Issue: The Meditation Industry” (January 29, 2018), Sage businessresearcher, 6.
[14] National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health, Meditators and Nonmeditators Differ on Demographic Factors, Health Behaviors, Health Status, and Health Care Access, New Analysis Shows.
[15] Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
[16] Robert Wright, "Is Mindfulness Meditation A Capitalist Tool Or A Path To Enlightenment? Yes," Wired, August 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/08/the-science-and-philosophy-of-mindfulness-meditation/. (accessed May 8, 2019).
[17] "...the bulk of this war’s civilian casualties have come from the Saudi-led coalition’s technological superiority and exclusive domination of the air. In the process, coalition airstrikes have left a trail of material evidence in their wake, including the remains of many Raytheon-manufactured systems.” Jefferson Morley, "Raytheon’s profits boom alongside civilian deaths in Yemen," Salon, June 27, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/06/27/raytheons-profits-boom-alongside-civilian-deaths-in-yemen_partner/. (accessed February 28, 2019).
[18] Nafeez Ahmed, op. cit.
[19] John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019)
[20] Rebecca Stoner, "The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous," MR online, December 21, 2018, https://mronline.org/2018/12/21/the-language-of-capitalism-isnt-just-annoying-its-dangerous/. (accessed December 26, 2018).
[21] Stoner, op. cit.
[22] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992): 72.
[23] For this and other features of FMC, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Review, 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1 - 16.
