Book Review: The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, by Michael Perelman

Abstract

Michael Perelman The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, Monthly Review Press: New York, 2011; 280pp: 9781583672297, 15 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The organisation of society according to market principles has a dramatic impact upon people's everyday lives. In particular, alienation from the labour process itself results in workers being traumatised. Managers and corporate owners employ innovative techniques for maximising profit and competing with other corporations. They remain, however, reluctant to delegate control of the labour process or to implement reforms that might empower the workers. This is striking, since there is enough evidence to suggest that workers' increased participation in decision-making processes provides strong leverage in terms of competitive gains. But it can also be considered conventional, since authorising workers to take decisions regarding their work might be considered tantamount to a confession by the managerial class and controlling elite of their incapacity to rule and to decide whatever is best for the corporation. Members of the working and middle classes seldom find happiness in their daily routines, since they are deprived of opportunities for designing, controlling and transforming what they are doing. Michael Perelman's The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism questions not only the disempowerment of workers, but also its reflections in the history of economic thought. It was only by the construction of a genuinely authoritarian vision degrading the workers that capitalists were able to undermine the collective capacity of the labouring masses. Thanks to mainstream economic thought's identification of individuals first and foremost as consumers or utility seekers, and ignoring workplace conditions as objects of inquiry, the capitalist class had a useful tool named economics', while discipline attained the position of scientific inquiry of society in the aftermath of marginalist revolution. Perelman's work, which is composed of ten main parts, each subdivided into short sections, provides an engaging review of the efforts to transform the vocabulary used in economic analysis, and the way scholars approach fundamental issues such as control of the money supply, inflation, and measuring the wealth of societies. The work's contribution resides in its success in relating theoretical debates in academic corridors or government branches to the pressing need for counter-leverage against collective demands. Providing numerous examples, the book shows how the collaboration of individualist principles of economic analysis with the suppression of labour demands impedes solidarity and traumatises workers. Perelman uses the metaphor of a Procrustean bed to explain the market torture stretching the poor and labourers, or cutting them off to fit into the bed. According to the neoliberal gospel, people should obey market discipline and try to fit in, since Procrusteanism provides efficiency. Workers are expected to sacrifice themselves to work in order that the market can provide them with things. The market is supposed to care for their needs in this way, but in reality working people merely function as a means to an end (human capital), rather than as an end in themselves' (p. …